 Okay, well, it is 6.30, so we're going to get started. Okay, so the first thing is to review and approve the agenda, and I don't think we have any adjustments to be made unless anyone has some suggestions. Okay, so without objection, we'll consider the agenda approved. So general business and appearances. This is an opportunity for any member of the public to come address the council on some topic that is otherwise not on our agenda. And if you have something to say, if you would say your name, where you're from, and try to keep your comments to two minutes or less, and that is true for, generally speaking, all of the comments on any regular business item, if possible. Okay, so you know when to hop up, we're going to move on. So the consideration of the consent agenda. Is there a motion regarding the consent agenda? Oh, Lauren? There were two things I had said. In the March 13th minutes, it still had Donna as the alternate for the Central Vermont Solid Waste Management District, so I think that should be changed. It was listed correctly in the first part, but then when we were doing it for Allen's appointment, it said Donna was the alternate. So we should up. All those then, because I actually didn't take those, but I thought it was a really close one. Hey, John, can you speak into your mic? Thanks. Can you fire me off an email? Absolutely. I can yank them from now, and I'll just tweak that and put them on next time. All right, so do you remember which minutes those were? There were two. Yeah, it was from the March 13th meeting. Should we just pull that one off then? Yeah, okay. I'll fix it the next time. Okay. I mean, that's a substantive change. Yeah. It seems like, I guess, I mean, I could just change it. We just move to amend it right now. Move to amend it right now. Sure. After they do that. It's changed in one place and not the other, so I consider it like a typo. Well, yeah, that's just a technical error. Okay. I can correct technical errors. That's fine. Okay, fair enough. Okay. So with that, is it changed? Is there otherwise a motion regarding the consent agenda? Move the consent agenda. Say it again. And just to clarify, that's with this. For the discussion, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Great. Thank you. Okay, so the review of the ordinances. So this, the attachment I know was very long, but the intent here was not to dive into the substance of the ordinances or the amendments to the ordinances at this point. But just to talk through what our plan was going to be to take this up, because it is a lot to read through. Do you want to comment on this? And Jamie's here who kind of spearheaded organizing all of this. So she has, she's been sharpening everything so you may have, if you have questions, you can help with that. But basically, as you know, one of our goals last year was to go through all the ordinances and get them updated and bring them up to speed. And we finally got most of the way there. I think there's probably a few that will come straggling in. And we really wanted to know how you wanted to approach those. Our suggestion, if this is helpful, is that we do the one chapter at a time at a meeting. So we would do like, you know, because the, some of them are, the chapters are pretty quick. They're, they're not that difficult. So we might do chapter one, first reading at the next meeting, and then after that would be chapter one, second reading and first reading of chapter two and just work our way through. And if, you know, we get hung up on a chapter, then obviously we'll stay with that till we're done with it. But just at each meeting, just try to work our way through one chapter. Some of them are more substantive than others, but really the lion's share of them are just clean up. So that would just be kind of a steady piece of our work plan at all. Any comments about that plan? Or you could just approve them all tonight, except you can't. We didn't warn it as a hearing. I'm seeing general, oh okay, lots of nods, but Jack. I think that's fine. I think it's a good, I was thinking some way to space it out over time, whether it's a chapter at a time or something, bigger chunks than that, but either way, much better that people know, if people are at home or paying attention to particular sections, they don't have to come in and sit through a whole thing. And some of the chapters will go super quickly, and others, you know, will be longer. So would you or Jamie then arrange it in groupings and let us know which one we want to do when? That would be great. And then the advanced agenda so you can see the light. Right. That's what our plan was to start with one and go through. But if some don't have very many, you might group them in a larger grouping, that's all. Never know what will generate conversation. Great, I don't know that we need a motion on that, but people are generally okay with this idea to do a chapter. Yeah, go ahead, Connor. Yeah, not just separate, but somewhat connected. I know we haven't reviewed the personnel manual since 2007, so if you think like the Affordable Care Act have come in, you know, I noticed like non-classified employees are like required to live in Montpelier, I don't think that's the case. So I think that's the sweetest of that as well. That's in the works. Okay. Yeah, that'll be in this year's. It's in the pipeline. Cool. Okay. All right, so we're going to move on from that. So we're on to the Main and Berry Street scoping study, which I'm really excited to talk about. So I know we have some consultants and our own staff, so welcome. Thank you. Yeah. You all have a presentation, is that right? Yeah. Okay, I'm going to vacate this spot. And while we're waiting for this to come up, I just remind everyone to use the mics, get us close. Okay. Are these? Those are the ones. Yep. I'll try the best I can. Kind of overcoming the cold here. So we're here this evening with Lucy Gibson and Sophie Swaw. Sorry. Swaw and Sophie from DuBois and King. They have a presentation for us to take us through the Main and Berry scoping study, where we've been, where we are and what our next steps are. We are not here tonight looking for final approval. This is an opportunity for us to get you up to speed and also take any comments or questions you have so we can go back and make any revisions and prepare the document, the draft study for final approval. Lucy will take you through the next steps so that we have, that'll happen between now and the next time you see this. I just wanted to quickly rewind the clock back here. I know there's been a lot of turnover on the council since the bike and pedmaster plan was approved and really this is a part of that plan. So that plan provided this connectivity network throughout the city, kind of showed where bicycle facilities should be, what they should be and there was this kind of blank space in the middle of it, which included this corridor and it kind of said we needed to look at this on its own. There's so many impacts here. Look at it in the context of the master plan but have its own study and so that's why we're here to see things, to fill in that blank within the monthly or motion plan. The other thing I wanted to make a point about is this is a scoping study, there currently is no funding in place to implement any of this, there are no permits in place, there are no traffic or parking ordinances in place that would back any of these changes up currently. Those are steps along the way after we finalized our vision and those are steps that you will be included in as well as different departments at the state level. So I think without any further ado, Boosie. Great, thanks for making time for this week. We enjoyed working with Corey and the rest of the team on the city and also give thanks to an advisory committee who met a number of times and perhaps we have one more meeting and Donna was the city council representative and a lot of members from other organizations and committees in town and we had great feedback from the staff and we had the teams, more people then listed it to Boisan King but our core team was myself, Sophie and Julia who both, Julie and Sophie live in Montpelier so we're also really lucky to have in-depth local knowledge and here is the timeline that we did the study over. It was intended to be more about a 12 month but we, you know, the project as you'll see if we go through it gets quite complicated. We took a little extra time as we went through to consult with city departments and various committees over the course of the study and so this just gives a timeline but we had several project steering committee or maybe their advisory committee meetings. We met with MTIC, the Montpelier Transportation Infrastructure Committee and then we also had a meeting with all the city managers of different city departments and they were all really helpful and hopefully we brought all that input but we certainly, this is a draft and we want to get more input from you all tonight and any further direction that we might need and so what I'm planning for this evening because I know you don't want to spend all evening on it, I'll go through a lot of the background parts of the study fairly quickly but just so you have an idea of all the areas we covered and then focus probably a little more detail on what were the recommendations coming out of the study at this point that we really, the main focus for your input of course. So we did, in the scoping study, we really did reach out several different ways to get public input on some of the issues and concerns that people have in the study area which again was Main Street and Erie Street and we did an online map where people could click online at their convenience and give comments and locate places of concern and this is the, and in addition we have town meeting day we have paper maps where people could put red dots for concerns and green dots for things they like and make notes so we have a lot of good information from what people are thinking and experiencing in downtown because you know we look at it from a professional design standpoint but it's really the users have the best experience that help us understand the issues. So from this map it's pretty clear that the biggest red spot is the intersection of Main Street and Erie Street so that was clearly a number one and then a few other hot spots. The top hot spots I listed off here and clearly number one was Main Street and Erie Street and probably most of these comments in general were more from the pedestrian perspective than the bicycle perspective because there's obviously a lot more people walking through downtown than biking and then also comments about people driving too that we're about unsafe or difficult to drive even so we have comments from all different roads but some of the main themes was that Berry and Main Street some type of traffic control is needed and it could be around about or traffic signal and then crossing Main Street at Berry Street is a major crossing but it feels very unsafe it's wide and there's so much chaotic kind of traffic movement that pedestrians don't feel confident that the drivers see them and are going to react accordingly so it's not a comfortable place to travel through by any mode of transportation. Another really hot spot was just Berry Street itself and at the time we were doing this it was around February a town meeting day and I think there are big snow banks and people really talked about how narrow it is with parking on both sides and people get their mares taken off or it feels very unsafe to open your door to get out of that kind of thing so there were suggestions so get rid of one lane of parking or make it one-way street you know different ideas were also mentioned. A third hot spot was the crossing at Langdon Street and people had observations both from a driver's perspective and a pedestrian crossing perspective that because it's during congested times pedestrians aren't sure that drivers are going to stop for them because they've just gotten through state and main intersection and drivers feel like if they stop they'll get rear-ended by anxious cars getting through so there's a lot of challenges in moving through this crossing as well and both drivers and pedestrians have concerns. And then another concern is with during peak hour when there's a huge traffic standing there a pedestrian's trying to cross sort of slips through the cars and it's sort of hidden by the waiting cars so there's some safety issues there as well. The state and main intersection there were a lot of different comments but not necessarily all bads they were kind of mixed and then the school and main street intersection was another spot where pedestrians especially crossing at that location feel like it's very wide cars can get going a little bit fast as they're trying to buzz out of town and that it's hard to get on-domain street from the side street and a lot of suggestions for always stop like a spring and helm. So that was one of the feedback that we got that was very helpful and then we also heard some and also and really was informed by the Montpelier motion plan of there's some challenges riding a bike from Montpelier as well there you know well you have the bike paths are great but riding through the streets in the study area again was focusing on main and very there aren't bike lanes there's a fairly heavy traffic so people riding might feel exposed if they're not the real confident riders and then you see a lot of people riding on sidewalks and that's while it may feel safer than riding the street it actually can be quite dangerous because every time there's a driveway the car may not see this cyclist especially when they're hidden by parked cars from the view of the driver so it's not a it's a sign that the streets aren't making people comfortable to ride and instead they're choosing another place that's not very safe to ride and some of the other thinking about what kind of bicycle infrastructure should be provided for in this central part of town and the map in the left shows the infrastructure that's currently planned there are different shades of colors but they kind of you can get a sense that there's a network but it's sort of missing hole in the middle the graph on the right is we don't we have limited data on how many people ride on what streets but we do get some data from online bike apps that people use while they're riding their bikes so it gives you an idea of the places people want to ride are very much the same as they want to drive and you know people want to make the connection between the paths and some of the other bike lanes and other parts of town so again these are the areas where infrastructure is not there but a lot of potential demand is there and another thing that we want to think about when we're thinking about bicycle infrastructure is who are we designing the infrastructure for because bicyclists vary widely in their ability and on the right side of that chart you have the kind of people that have no trouble riding now on the streets they're don't mind riding in traffic they're confident and then the next group the seven percent are fairly confident riders they're probably likely to feel comfortable riding and on Montpelier streets but then there's a lot of people that and these these percentages are average around surveys that done around the country so not Montpelier specific but no reason to think it's different there's a big group of people that would like to ride a bike more they are interested in riding but they're not comfortable on high what we call high stress routes where there's a lot of traffic and no designated lanes or space for them so really to get more people riding in Vermont which is the vision put out in the master plan we really want to think about getting those people comfortable riding on the streets or pathways and then we looked at a lot of different types of infrastructure this is just a range where from on the left side are Cheros which is just nothing more than marking a bike symbol on the road showing telling traffic they expect bikes and showing bikes that they need to kind of ride in the lane because there's not a separate lane and then there's various types of bike lanes with more and more protection as you go to the right on the graphic I won't go into detail but it's the far right is a totally protected path like what you have in the central Vermont path or protected bike lanes that are really physically separated from traffic and that's what we call lower stress facility where in person riding feels a lot less stress and doesn't have to be sharing the traffic so those are the kind of facilities we want to try to look at and connecting the central Vermont path to other parts of town and then this is a quick review of the design goals that we had and looking at alternatives for addressing this need is pedestrians are really the number one concern because there are a lot more pedestrians again than probably potential bike riders and certainly existing but we also want to provide that low stress bike network to allow a wide range of ages and abilities for people to ride we definitely need to consider traffic circulation because they're two are all related and another consideration is to maintain as much on-street parking as possible as a key economic and way to access downtown and then to consider the all the different modes of transportation so with that we came up with four alternatives for different arrangements of bike lanes and intersection designs and we have this is for main street and then we have a couple for various street all represented but basically there are we'll kind of go over these quickly because they're not you know these are studies that we want to hear about basically having traffic signals at all the intersections that need a signal and that would be at definitely at berry street potentially at school street we did look at the school street main street intersection and it could be signalized it has enough traffic to you it doesn't have to be but that would be an option the second one is round about at all the intersections and also providing bike lanes when we put those out we had a lot of interest in the committee to have a third option which would be round about at some intersections signals at others and particularly around about at berry and school street and then the fourth option is really inspired by the greening america's capital report and that was a plan that looked at changing the intersections and parking on main street and assume bikes would use elm street and through the heaney jacob slot i think it's called i'm pronouncing it correctly so i'll do i'll go through these with a little more illustration so here's the existing conditions on main street just for orientation main streets going up and down and then berry streets kind of on the lower right heading down in the southeast direction and then that little orange line is where we're showing a lot of cross sections basically a slice through the street and the diagrams the left is a showing and i know you can't read all the numbers on it but these are what we've been looking at carefully like what is the width between the buildings and how is it allocated between travel lanes parking lanes sidewalks etc so that's our existing condition for both the pavement markings and the cross section and the cross section varies a lot as you go down main street so it's not the same everywhere we looked at it all over but i won't go through up the drawings so the traffic signal and bike lane option is shown here and there'd be a new traffic signal at main and berry um there could be one at school in main although it's not it doesn't really affect the geometry and basically this option involves taking away one lane of parking and we generally down to on the east side or the right side hand side and then that provides space for bike lanes on either side of the street so that's what the cross section there shows it doesn't that all fits within the existing paved areas because the existing lanes are quite wide and can be narrowed down quite a bit and provide the room for the bike lanes but we still need to take one lane of parking out to fit them in so and then the langdon street crosswalk was one of the topics that we looked at and what i'll show here we looked at a few options to relocate it so on that diagram the white crossing right by front of city center is the existing crossing we looked at one option is to bring it down basically make it part of the signalized intersection at state street another option was to move it up to the alley there and i'm forgetting the name of the street but it's a little hazel way and that that seemed to be the one that's most preferred and i think this is probably a topic that might you know have more ongoing discussion but that brings it a little bit further from the traffic light so it's not so abruptly that you get through main and state and immediately stop for a crosswalk it'll allow a little more room for cars to stop and not feel as much that we'll get here it's probably not going to solve every issue but that seems to be the one that garnered the most interest in thinking about changing so main and school was another concern and again that does meet traffic signal warrants in terms of its volume and we were asked to look at an always stop there by a lot of people as comments we got and we did look at that but it really doesn't it's not a good candidate for that because there's a lot of traffic on main street compared to school street whereas the other intersection that this treatment recently which is elm and spring that has much more balanced traffic meaning the track is about equal and that's a really good place to put an always stop but this one with a lot of traffic on main street that every car would have to stop would be probably really frustrating and could create rear end accidents why not just not a recommended treatment without reasoning so all right now here's the second option which is roundabouts at all the key intersections and then also providing bike lanes so when we've shown the memorial drive intersections kind of at the edge of our study area that we threw in a roundabout there too and then a roundabout at dairy street is the next one up and then small and these are smaller roundabouts to fit within the area of the right way and then a small roundabout at state main and then another roundabout at school and then one of the advantages of roundabouts is that you don't need to have the left turn lanes of the intersections so you actually can fit parking on both sides of the street and then also have bike lanes so this option doesn't require as much parking removal here to them signals and just to one to zoom in this is a drawing from the greening of mirrors because capital report which shows that mini roundabout at state main which is pretty much the same design that we thought is you know with the constrained space that's really the only way it could work um one of the things that's important to realize is that with this design all the traffic that comes in from east state street has to make a right turn and it cannot get into the roundabout just with the amount of space and the offset of the streets it would basically be pulling in a head-on traffic and um so this makes a big change in traffic circulation it's important to understand the other challenge of this is if we had a bike lane coming into it bikes coming into a roundabout generally either get off onto the sidewalks and share that with pedestrians or to ride through this traffic and given we're thinking about the less confident riders we'd expect a lot of people might make a choice to ride onto the sidewalk and so the concern is you have their big busiest corner downtown will have a mix of people biking and walking which is an ideal for the people walking to help them to share you know more congested kind of sidewalk obviously it's possible but it's a just a thing to know about how this would work and then this is just a diagram we did along with our analysis a lot of traffic modeling to understand the implications and in this case so east state street's coming in from a sort of lower right and because that traffic cannot turn left into continue on state street or left on main anyone that wants to go continue down state street we've assumed would take a right and then a left on Langdon and go around the lot and anyone that wants to go left on main street would probably take a right on cedar street and then around to school street and then around the block so this does create you know a lot of a bit of inconvenience for a fair number of people that currently make this remix and so and I'll just the roundabout at east state street because of this and the sharing there was a real mix for viewing it in our alternatives workshop so it wasn't it wasn't beloved and you know it's intriguing but it definitely has some concerns and because of that we really were asked to look at a hybrid option that would be a big roundabout at berry street the first circle there and then also many roundabout or small roundabout at school street so this is what we're calling the hybrid and then as far as the parking and travel lanes it's also kind of a hybrid there's some areas that can have parking on both sides and bike lanes and other areas especially as you're getting near the traffic signals where we need those left turn lanes so we have to take parking off one side so it's kind of in between all those ways and one of the concerns of this of kind of mixing roundabouts with signals is something that is a consideration that currently there's often long queues of traffic either coming from state street down rain street or from memorial drive up main street and when we have a roundabout in the midst of traffic signals like that the traffic stand flowing through the backing up through the roundabout will mean no one from nearest street can move at all as those queues are there so it can't have the effect of making a lot harder for people to get out from your street so that's now that's during peak hour and you know that's maybe one hour of the day or maybe not even one half the day so just a consideration and then the last alternative was the one based on greening America's capitol so this is a diagram of what main street was like in that report from airy street with a roundabout up to the small roundabout at state main and that in that case they actually assume bikes would not be on main street or they if they're on main street they'd be sharing the road and there'd be more of a bikeway developed on elm street and through the parking area to connect to the bike path and this involves kind of a reconfiguration of parking it's not necessarily more parking because they've removed some put it in other places and it does include well it has the airy street treatment that matching what will be shown and then a lot of it's you know green storm water infrastructure and streetscape so then here's just a diagram showing what we were assuming for the elm street area which was which would be part of this option so for elm street to have a low stress bike network the ideas would become a one-way street and based on traffic we suggested that vehicle traffic would be southbound only and then on the left side of elm street we're showing a two-way bike lane now this could be reconfigured to have parking on the other side bikes on one side as there are probably a lot of different options but that's the idea of having a bikeway on elm street on elm street sorry and then it would be basically some kind of a shared low speed through through the parking area that connects the bike path and that wasn't too well defined in the greening marriage capital it would require removing a whole row of parking there to make it protected by facility so so converting elm street to one way put a lot of room for the bikes but we didn't and we did have it we recommend it be one way rather than removing all the parking because the parking there is really critical for a lot of properties that have no off-street parking and then you know there will be some traffic impact as it sends traffic so this is the idea of what would happen so the the purple arrow shows the direction of travel on elm street between port street or school street and state street and so traffic going the other way would follow the yellow areas that actually have to go through state and main and then around block and so that's that is adding traffic to you know one of the model like intersections and adding a left turn which is even a little more of an impact so those are considerations definitely traffic so i'm not going to go through all the details but we did a pretty thorough review of the pros and cons of each of the options for main street and really learned a lot about the different choices we have and i'll get into more of the recommendations later on i want to think that gets a berry street because that is another important part of the study area and for berry street we looked at basically three options one is a shared use path they're also called a side path on one side of berry street and it would involve basically widening the sidewalk to be wide the same width as a shared use path and then that and it could go on we have we'll talk about which side of the street it could be on but it would require removing parking from one side of berry street and that is a continuation of the kind of facility that are going to be it's going to be eating that street segment and either side so that was an advantage of that there is a another option i'll show a two-way protected bike lane which is means there's a sidewalk and then the bike lanes and then traffic or there's a one-way protected bike lane on each side that one has to remove parking from both sides of the street so that was one that was not not really consumed further other than to note that it was another option so so here is a layout of the shared use path which is showing a kind of pinkish line and one of the important things to also notice that the main design of main street berry street intersection really affects what side of the path red side street the path should be on so if there is a roundabout we don't have room for the crossing to i'll stay on the south side of berry street the ideal would be to keep the whole path on the south side so we can get to the rec center and any kids riding that have the fewest possible crossing street but with the roundabout right next to the railroad track the only way is to have people go around the other side and that's definitely a concern about this option and then having a path on the north side of berry street does actually have a bit of a higher parking impact that's another concern so so with the signalized option of main street berry street we can keep the path against kind of a pinkish line on the south side of berry street the whole way so it really is the most comfortable connection between and upon the very upper left corner of the aerial there's a dotted line is rooted so it's kind of easy the cross section shown below basically shows there'd be parking on one side two travel lanes and then a it could be up to 12 foot wide it might the width might vary a little bit but a comfortably wide path to share if you're biking and people walking the bike to share so this is another option where we are taking not changing the curves or the sidewalks in berry street and just taking one of the parking lanes and repurposing it into a two-way bike lane and that's the green striped areas on the right of the cross section diagram and it would need a little bit of a separation from traffic because you do have bikes coming one way and cars going the other way so you want to provide a little bit of space this is a you know it fits within the cross section but it's very tight and it's probably going to be a design that's not going to feel that comfortable both for the cars and the people walking but it can work at least the minimum standards so it will be you know in the winter the winter maintenance of this will have to be really thought through will it be cloud keeping the parked car on the other side as close to curve as possible is going to be important which in effect snow riddles so you know there are a few design challenges but it's something that could fit in and so here are again I don't want to go into a lot of detail but basically there's the shared use path in combination with the roundabout versus the signal and that really affects what side of the how you cross main street and what side of the street the path to be on and then there's a two way protected bike lanes and the one way protected bike lanes are the ones that are we really didn't pursue further because they is introducing a completely different type of facility where you have two paths and then one way bike lanes on either side requiring more crossing so and it takes all parking away if I question sure so in any of these scenarios though that means losing parking on one side of Berry Street yeah and it's go back to a drawing there's fewer spaces lost when it's on the south side of Berry Street than on the north side and the thought was that parking on the north side is more important because it's serves a church in the laundry map I think it only goes down part of the way doesn't it like the rec center this goes to the rec center just so you know it's not all the way down Berry Street actually I think it was eight parking spaces and there's 13 on the north side and there's a lot of driveways that limits how many parking spaces are actually there right I just I would remind the council that we did away with any parking requirements for new structures that are built there in the zoning last year so we need to be mindful that any of those changes would have significant impacts for people who live there and might have a car if there's no parking requirement per their unit so here's the summary of the parking from our initial run through the options so the existing is close to 120 on-street parking spaces just within the study area obviously there's a lot of other parking but we've just been focusing on that and the first option which was putting in signals and bike lanes cuts the parking just about in half and basically getting parking off of one side of the street that's simple way to think of it the two M2 and M3 options those had the roundabouts or combination and that to save allow more parking to be preserved and then the greening america's capital have quite a bit more parking but it didn't have bike lanes main street and there are a lot of other things we looked at traffic traffic modeling and flows and the summary of that is the roundabouts do work better for the traffic flow than signals none of these were really making anything worse than this now so it didn't seem to rise to the most important consideration perhaps for the parking so this is a summary based on again a lot of conversation probably not unanimous consensus but of where we go with a preferred alternative and then we also talked about short term because this is some big changes that would be considered in long term so i might focus first on the long term column and then the different pieces of the study area are listed there on the left so for main street the long term recommendation will be protected by planes and then combined with some access management and other things to both improve safety and also actually increase the amount of parking that would be preserved on main street knowing that's important for the main street and berry street intersection it's recommended that we do a traffic signal rather than a roundabout and i know that was something that there wasn't full consensus but one of the really most important reasons for that is the crossing of the bike path is much better under the signal scenario and another advantage of that is that the city is considering an adaptive signal control system throughout the downtown and having a signal there be part of that could really help a lot of the intersections work better where when you have the mix of roundabouts and signals you're not getting that much advantage from that so for berry street we'd recommend the side path on the south side of the intersect street you know combination of the signal is a long term the protected bike lane option could be a short term first step that's very inexpensive to implement and for the school and main intersection a mini roundabout there was definitely well received and would be the safest for both cars and pedestrians walking by king etc and there's the streets there's quite wide so it has minimal impact so i want to go in some of the reasons about why signals because i know there's you know in a lot of discussion especially with reading america's capital about roundabouts but the variety of concerns that helped potentially tip the balance was one of them just that need to share walking and biking on the sidewalks around the roundabouts for anybody who's not comfortable riding through the roundabout as a vehicle another thing about roundabouts in really downtown areas is they when we look at the plans it actually requires pedestrians to walk a bit out of the direction rather than straight across from corner to corner than they can with signals and then there's the traffic diversion issue especially the state main intersection that would be the inconvenience to people and then the berry and main street roundabout is going to be challenging at the very best just because it gets right up to the railroad and you know what dealing with the railroad is like from a lot of other projects and it's just a very tight spot so it's not a be a difficult design and then the having again the roundabout with signals remaining would have potential traffic issues where cues would be backing through the roundabout and walk through the map and so some of the advantages of the signal option that tip the balance is again the berry street bike path not needing to cross berry street um it allows for the adaptive signal control to really have more higher potential in the lead engaging congestion and um the coordination of the other signals will reduce with all of them coordinated together should reduce stops and delays through downtown events wasn't again the main focus of our study but that opportunity that helped tip that balance and just want to talk a little bit about why protected bike lanes versus regular bike lanes there's more and more cities that are building protected bike lanes this is an example of one in Cambridge Mass it's obviously on a bigger wider street but we you know our work that we've done we think they'll fit in Montpelier and Main Street but it's basically having a bike at the same level as the sidewalk and separated from traffic on Cambridge Mass is deciding this is what all bike lanes should be and their engine planning that they're going to convert all their bike lanes to this style which will be tough because it does tend to track parking but um it's really the best way to meet the goals and Montpelier emotion it's the best practice safest design and they've been shown to also really encourage more people to ride which is one of the goals of Montpelier emotion as well this is what I handed out 11 by 17 so they'll still be required to have a magnified glass perhaps but this is what the preferred alternative look like the red ribbons there are the protected bike lanes and the cross-section there on the left shows how it would work to be parking on one side the bikes would be elevated up above the level of the curve on the side where there is parking we need a little buffer for people to open their doors get out of their cars and not hit the bikes that fits in and then the sidewalks would be pretty much the same width as they are now we're not really approaching them and that might vary a little from block to block just because the width but they'll be at least as wide or wider and here's some examples that's one Cambridge is another example in Chicago with what they can look like they can be a different color to really demarcate them from the sidewalk and then this is just a diagram showing the existing cross-section this is like the pinch point in front of Friday where you have buildings as close to each other as anywhere and the existing is on the top and the proposed is on the bottom and again the sidewalks are just about identical and it's really taking one line of parking and narrowing the lanes to right sizing them to what they should be gives us the risk for that so we also have a short term that's like a big change that would take a lot of work and money and time to make a change like that but in the short term painted bike lanes on the street would be a big improvement and so we have a plan for that as well and this is just restricting existing pavement some other things would be providing curb extensions at some of the crosswalks and the mini roundabout at school street could be implemented again with more temporary kind of materials so this would involve you know scraping down the nice new pavement that you just put down and repoting a new layer and painting it so it's probably not something that would be done right away anyway but it could be something to consider as the pavement starts getting a little crafter you know but neither refreshments or this would also be on Berry Street that could be the two-way protected bike lanes that get just just resurfacing existing pavement and that could be obviously doesn't all that be done all once Berry Street could go ahead much sooner and so I want to talk a little bit too about rapid implementation a lot of cities that are wanting to really build out bike lanes like networks are using a combination of you know capital construction and then what we call quick build methods which is more with paint flexible bollards plastic flower pots other things to help define redefine the space on streets a little bit differently to make them safer for walking and biking and so two of the things that could be good candidates for this kind of approach would be the Berry Street protected bike lanes which would be the two-way bike lanes on one side and also the school street mini roundabout this could be done quite inexpensively here's a few examples of similar projects Burlington's been doing a lot with quick build and photos might be a little hard to see but the top right is south union street where they have plastic curving just nailed into the road or bolted in and then flexible posts that sometimes get knocked down and into your place but they do keep cars from encroaching the bike lane which is a real big issue there and then on the lower right are just using paint an epoxy surface that's colored flower pots and plastic bollards with reflectors you can create curb extensions much more cheaply than using curves and more permanent methods and eventually that might all become permanent but for now you can get a lot of benefit from it and then on the left is just a picture from Sao Paulo Brazil where they actually create a roundabout using these techniques there are places in the US they've done that as well but using you can do a lot with paint and lines as long as you have reflectors and other safety and there's more and more like design standards to follow to do this kind of project so we and as we looked at the refined short and long-term alternatives we did really try to bring back as much parking as we could so we thought the existing parking is about 120 spaces on the two streets and we have the short-term option preserves more than 80 I think it's about 85 I'll give you the exact number and the long term it loses a few more parking spaces but you know we basically tried to save as many as we can and that was a net change of 40 parking spaces and it's you know hard to know the exact numbers till you really go through more of the design with the survey why not the estimate of what the parking impact would be now cost so we have I've now started the short-term costs and then I'll go to the long-term costs so the for main street to basically scrape down the pavement and do all the new pavement arcings to put in bike lanes and rearrange parking is more than half a million we're estimating at current prices $565,000 as we know prices go up every year so if you drop this in three years which might be more realistic given the pavements new it's probably going to be more than that but you know it's not inexpensive but that's pretty much just cost of redoing the pavement redoing it by grinding it down and not kind of rub out the lines for the intersection to put a short term put in a traffic light is about 200,000 and that's pretty it requires some right-of-way railroad coordination probably but it's a project generally for the berry street doing the protected bike lanes as a quick build kind of approach with just the inexpensive materials it's a budget about $50,000 and then the school and main intersection the mini roundabout could also be done with quick build and we we put in a budget of 20 30,000 these kind of things could be done a lot more cheaply depending on what you select so this is maybe kind of an upper limit assuming you want it with some flower pots and other things to make more attractive but it would be possible certainly to do it a bit less than that then in the long term starting the main street and building protected bike lanes and doing some you know curved relocation stormwater relocation traffic control and other things is about 1.2 million now if you were going to do that kind of major project on main street you'd probably want to do more with more tree planting and green stormwater infrastructure so this cost doesn't include all those kind of elements we're really just focusing on what is the cost to get the infrastructure for the pikes in place and it would obviously best do the solid one big effort which I think with the upcoming master planning effort that would be the outcome of that is knowing more about what would be included in that project for the berry and main street we sort of divided the signal to be the first to put a signal in and then the next estimate of $200,000 is the cost to do the adaptive signal control to tie it in with all the other intersections and make it a lot more efficient and that's a estimate we got from the provider of the technology on berry street to actually go for the long term and build the side path on the south side is about $250,000 we're assuming it's an asphalt path that involves some relocation of stormwater a few utility poles parking meters that kind of thing and then the school and main street intersection to do a more permanent kind of mini roundabout with curbing more attractive would be about 175,000 and again these are costs or today's costs and they need to be escalated out in the out years so and the priority is based on really what we heard from a lot of people throughout the study is number one would be the traffic signal at berry street with the pedestrian crossing is an urgent kind of low hanging group number two the school street mini roundabout and again this a quick build approach would be a low cost number three the berry street protected by planes and to be timed with when the bike path is really and so when that happens might depend on all coming together and then eventually the side path and then the main street design obviously not necessarily lower priority but a longer term action that there'd be some more master planning done with a whole streetscape that would be important to find them so our next steps well we'd like to get input from you and any of the city staff was reviewing it and the committee and by the end of the April we'd like to get all that input and make revisions we have to have the report reviewed by the trans they provide the funding for the study and then once we get their comments and final revisions and I don't expect major comments from them so I don't want to change everything and try to close out this by the end of May is our goal when there'd be another city council presentation so the one thing I would add to this slide is it will go to the the transportation infrastructure committee again before it comes here so that is what I have and I have questions I have to answer well thank you I think this is very exciting this is a really big deal for our community gosh one of the things that we hear a lot about on the council is there's complaints about traffic or feeling safe on the streets or anyway any all all things traffic related so one of the things that I was curious about with the next steps excuse me I I know you've done a lot of outreach to the community and as a resident of Berry Street I remember I remember you soliciting input from people in the area and I one of the things that I'm I'm very interested in is now that there's some sort of preliminary results that are out and some suggestions to talk about I would love to have especially for the the Berry Street implications I would love to have some kind of a meeting like host some kind of a event maybe at the senior center to say hey hey Berry Street community you know here's a plan and some some ideas what do you think about this and just continue that that dialogue I don't know if that if you feel like you've already done that but I think I would find that useful just to have that experience even myself so I just want to put that out there to you all that that's something that I'm going to offer up my my time to to do probably when schools out so sometime in mid to late June you know try to have some kind of a Berry Street community meeting about some of the Berry Street particular particularly you know some of those those implications so that's one thing other comments or questions from council Connor your reference sort of like a one-way Elm Street there but I didn't see anything for Elm Street on the recommendations does that mean just leave it as is or yeah we recommending having the bike lanes on Main Street which means Elm Street stays as is okay thanks because that was part of the alternative that didn't happen and just a question of public input I think first I agree with the mayor completely just as far as having a really robust conversation I would expand that to talk about you know when I canvas on Berry Street there were issues about lighting you know how many rubbish bins there were for you know I think a lot of people I feel a bit neglected there so maybe you could be in a broader conversation sure as far as public input how many responses did you get on this and I know that's not maybe easy to say because some of it was the interactive map some of it was the town meeting day stuff just kind of trying to get a handle on that I think it was in the hundreds I don't know all the dots on that and that may have been a hundred people great and there was a there was a good response to mention this there was a alternative presentation to the public as well and that was healthier and we had also videotaped that meeting and offered it on our website so that basically presented all the alternatives yeah and then it's all just kind of workshop where we had them all print it out and people could relive them but post it notes with their ideas or tell us their ideas so so we're very open to input and it's hard to always get everyone that wants to eventually have something to say but all right others um I would just I as a former Berry street resident myself for many years um I think that we actually need to take this out to the neighborhood I think it's a really it I realize that it's eight eight spaces you know is one of the proposals but that in in reality translates to people just parking further down on Berry street where residents park because not all of those units particularly the ones closer to town have parking um which segues into my second ask which is I know how the council voted last time but it was a split vote that we reconsider the the parking requirements in um not the designated downtown core but I think it was that that outer area um because there are places there that that don't have parking and you're still paying Montpelier rent but you have to have a car if you need to work anywhere other than pretty much Montpelier um so I I would hope that if the council is really going to consider this one that we would all make the effort to show up in the Berry street neighborhood to talk about why this is important but that we would also be willing to have another look at what parking requirements are going to be for dwelling units because if you you know work in Waterbury or even in Berry you know if I have to work late I can't take the bus home so just I would like to shamelessly plug that thank you Donna actually actually I support parking requirements everywhere because it forces business owners to then get creative about transit remote parking so it's not just residential area so you have my support there all of I definitely am very disappointed because only presents this very last draft suddenly roundabouts lost because of state and main configuration and I'm still pushing for roundabouts I have traveled all over the world and particularly my lots of visits to Sweden in the smallest areas with odd shaping streets and intersections the roundabout works and I've found a whole lot of examples but I don't have all the degrees so I'm still pushing for roundabouts because this is very decisive if we don't put roundabouts in because of one intersection when we can put them not only all the way down Main Street but ultimately in the Berrymont Pigaro Memorial Drive it roundabouts really work not only does it slow down traffic but the statistics some 75% less of any kind of injury crashes and interchange 35% as far as movement of traffic improvement so I'm just a roundabout supporter I was there when the first one went in and people said it couldn't be done for all sorts of reasons and I know engineers have the final say but I know there's some that do support them in odd places and so I'm still searching because I really want that opportunity to have them all the way down because they really make the whole atmosphere so much different once you have a signal all your other roundabouts won't work as well so it just is a really much better flow so I'm still there I'm also supporting the shared path on Berry Street I've had a lot of those in Europe and Sweden where bikes and people use the same space so that on Berry Street from the intersection of Berry and Main down to where you take the rec rec building and go back to the bike shared use path I really see that as a way to use the limited space without taking so much off the road and still being safe for people and bikes you have signages as shared it shows a person in a bike it works in very much larger places like Stockholm with a lot more traffic so I think we could do it here so those are my two biases thank you thank you uh Jack oh and then Glenn oh no I've got a few things a few observations one I'm with you on roundabouts I don't know all the places they should go I definitely see them on the main in school street intersection I see pushing about state street also I think Bailey Avenue is an intersection that could be the signals could be replaced by a roundabout and possibly Elm Street also which is which is a difficult intersection a lot of the day one of the things that I thought that I did in getting ready for tonight and I don't know if this is something you looked at but I talked to Fred Wilbur whom many of us know Fred owned a book spoiler for many many years and a few years ago he came out with a proposal to improve the pedestrian experience in the center of town by I I'll pass this out it's it's the idea is basically to take the whole space from the state and main intersection to Langdon Street and turn that all into a pedestrian zone for the pedestrian cycle of the of the traffic light and I don't know if anyone's looked at that seriously Fred spent time on his own trying to promote this but while we're looking at how to redesign the pedestrian and motor vehicle interactions I think it's worth at least making this part of the conversation as I think of the Langdon Street crosswalk and relation to the state main intersection one of the concerns that I always have is not whether I'm going to be rear-ended but the people using the crosswalk drive northbound traffic on on main street back into that intersection so so that ties things up in a way that it makes it makes it hard to get through there and the the other thing that's a real peeve of mine is people driving southbound on on main street when the light turns red they they block Langdon Street they don't they don't stop at the crosswalk and again that ties up traffic because people who would be turning left onto Langdon Street can't can't make that turn because just one person has decided to pull right up into the into the line of traffic and so those are things that I'd like to see see us address Glenn um first I want to echo the mayor's uh thanks for the presentation it's really exciting and great uh I've been thinking about this for a while I use almost this whole area daily as a pedestrian I I um walk down from my house on Prospect Street on the other side of the river to the drawing board and then down into downtown all the time um and I think that you've identified a lot of really good options I want to register my general philosophical support with Donna's for roundabouts jacks um I do the the the reasons why not a roundabout at state and main makes sense to me um it does seem really awkward to make everyone coming off east state turn right um I can't see an easy way around that one and uh also if it's if it's true and I see no reason to disbelieve it that putting a roundabout at main and Barry means that the bike path has to cross the street and go on the north side of Barry Street that also seems like a pretty big negative I think that the bike path should not have to to cross over there um in general I like the the suggested path forward it all looks pretty good um I'm curious if the and this is sort of like what Jack was saying about the the main and state intersection stretching up to Langdon Street in M1 uh there's the the kind of uh off rectangular area of that whole intersection um set up as free pass zone while the walk light is going uh so rather than four separate crosswalks there you can cross from TD bank straight across to Labrioche or that is diagonally across to Labrioche and that seems like a good element to me um and I was I was curious why that element did not continue through into the other options if there's an answer I don't know if there's really a final determinant I think that could be and it's not a big change we did look at some other more significant changes and you know everything's on a tight yeah so that and I just hard to see with the light but that could certainly be yeah incorporated pretty easily with how much change I think I like that it feels like a good element the other thing I'm curious about is um I spend a lot of time down at the bottom left at the the um Memorial Drive Main Street Northfield intersection waiting for that light and uh I would love it if that were a roundabout but I I mean I can imagine if the next intersection up isn't a roundabout then that's going to be problematic as you described because then the roundabout gets packed up probably not so much for that because we don't the Berry Street volumes are not that high yeah so we don't expect long queues we don't have to be a bottleneck it's more that when you have the bottleneck at Memorial Drive and it's state those buildings okay Berry Street so so I think a roundabout at Memorial could definitely be okay and it's you know because that's on the state system it was sort of the edge first right yeah yeah strong recommendation either way but I think that could be something that could be amended I'm in favor of that can I just ask a clarifying question the uh uh so making a roundabout at Memorial Drive makes it easier to have a roundabout at Berry in Main I think they're not really related I think Memorial Drive could have a roundabout regardless regardless okay and because and the reason is because Berry Street would not be expected to be a bottleneck it forms queues okay it's more that the queues from the signal back um I think so I'm gonna call myself here um I think that's very interesting um for Memorial Drive I am I will offer that I'm a skeptic of a roundabout at Berry in and Main uh because of the proximity to the train as well as the implications for the bike bike path I'm open to being convinced especially if you have some examples particularly near um uh interfacing with trains so that's uh that's one thing I also just want to make sure that I remember to say that I appreciated that you have a list of uh implementation priorities because obviously even with the uh short term uh you know possible projects we're not going to be doing all of those all at the same time and uh and I I agree that uh figuring out the uh Berry Main Street intersection is the highest priority so whether it's a roundabout or it's a signal that to me also floats to the top um of the the things that we should be doing and if the if this timeline holds and we are able to have some conversations um you know with the Berry Street community over the summer um we should be potentially in a good place to talk about that in time for the budgeting um season four uh that the next fiscal year so uh I just want to make sure that that's all on our our radars as well as we you know queue that up for for next budgeting cycle yes Donna oh and then Lauren I'm just asking about timing you keep talking about the Berry neighborhood in June you wouldn't want to do that before it goes to back to the trans well I guess we could I'm just thinking like that was me being you know realizing my own schedule but um but if that would be useful to you um we can try to do that um before May 31st right okay so they want to buy May and they consider it done it doesn't mean we can't adapt it exactly I just so I just wanted you to be able to stand there's a final product yes yes that's right unless you we still have decisions to make right once we forget so you're just trying to finalize the report that we have a process for making decisions I know I mean it's obligated to do everything in the report if you accept the report that yeah and I have one um further question about that just to clarify so I mean at least in your presentation for the short term um costs of the Berry Main Street intersection that was 200 000 and then the long term um solution was 200 000 is that because it's um it's it's not it looks like it's not totally the same it's not the same no and it just coincidence okay 200 000 for the long term is really tying all the signals together okay so is that and that's if that's a lot more benefits yeah okay interesting so potentially if if we spend 200 000 on the one before the traffic signal only um and then we decide to do the long term um then the we would be spending an additional 200 000 to replace or update um whatever signal had been put in now with it the new signal would be capable of being okay so wouldn't okay so that's not a new 200 000 okay just want to make sure the signals are 200 000 the coordinated signals are another 200 000 and then the path on Berry Street's another 250 000 right now I'm not talking about the path so it isn't you're saying it is an additional 200 000 right there's 200 to coordinate all the signals and 200 just to put the initial okay okay so what it wouldn't have been wasted 200 000 is the first time okay okay hardware software thank you okay that's helpful appreciate that oh and uh we had Tom and unless it's my question has to do with timing so it's true that once you report the report in and you get it you still can change it but is it also not true I'm asking those who apply for grants do you apply for a grant to get money to help do some of the things in this study does not aot look to say well why are you changing this or that do they not do they challenge it or is it is it okay because often they ask what you've done and whether you've studied it great but you I mean I think you can make amendments to it I mean I don't think you can radically change it so we did this study this gave us the alternatives the pros and cons we've selected this but we modified it slightly because of these reasons I mean that's you're still they're still evaluating the project that you're applying the grant for yes okay um Tom and then Lauren I assume your thing Tom had to do with what we were just talking about more general okay actually I'm gonna go to Lauren then next if that's okay um so I am also a general fan around about something a lot of round about love here um I I'm hearing the concerns with the Berry Street so one one thing I'm thinking about is it's intriguing this kind of low cost option for the roundabout at school street and um a I'm just thinking like sequencing the kind of comfort in the community and would also just urge public outreach with this school like as a parent driving to the school a lot and that is a horrible intersection when you're dealing with that and so just think of outreach to the school and the parents that are doing that drive every day and getting input and um you know hopefully building some comfort if we're going to go that route with with that so that when that goes in hopefully it's a success and people really like it and um maybe that's something we could do try to do sooner than later and then you know see how the community is responding to a roundabout in general cool that's a great idea Tom hi it's Tom McCartle of the works um just a few things um one on on the costs um correct me if I'm wrong but I think these are more order of magnitude levels of planning level so you get into design um it wouldn't be conceivable for example Berry Main whether it be a roundabout or signal could more than double that cost once you get into actual design so just keep that in mind these are just numbers to give you order of magnitude we've all know where these costs can go um and another is um we did look at uh Memorial Main the route 212 intersection is a roundabout we had a well-known roundabout expert Howard McCullough do that for us a few years ago several years ago um and that is still on our website um if you'd like to look at that um what that would look like it's a high volume traffic it's a partially tooling roundabout um there are access issues and fitting it out circle into a square hole we all know how difficult that can be um and although I've tried um um so mostly the round at the the gas station access the ledges the proximity to the river a lot of constraints there to consider um is workable but it's um that is a high impact high costs roundabout um and lastly uh back to what Donna was talking about as far as roundabouts and signals not necessarily working together um it was actually the same person and other roundabout experts who pointed out the benefits of sometimes having roundabouts and signals working together in unison roundup our traffic signals will create tend to create platoon flow that can be beneficial and how we organize traffic and how they how it arrives at intersections and roundabouts are constantly spitting out traffic and um so there they can actually work to the benefit uh when they are um a roundabout a signal a roundabout depending on what the traffic engineers sees for um what they're trying to accomplish what the what the issues are how their driveways are intersecting a lot of different things that need to be considered when looking at that so roundabout is one tool in our toolbox to to manage intersection traffic flow um it's not the only one and I think pedestrians are a big one um and and as under the ADA um for somebody who's visually impaired uh locating a crosswalk um and not having those visual cues um is something that also has has had a lot of attention lately and they've actually signalized some roundabouts um there are roundabouts that have been removed um because of pedestrian and bike issues so there's a lot that goes into the to the decision points of this and and and so I just I was on that on the fence of our roundabouts when we started looking at them 15 20 years ago I could see that that is one tool um that we should consider all of the implications all the constraints that we have to have to work um question sure go ahead Donna then Glenn I just because of that expertise about roundabouts and lights what happens with that extra long pedestrian crossing time that we have so the middle of all of that yeah so that's the negative side of the of the of a traffic signal is there's a lot of wasted time there's the clearance time the yellow and then the all red time um the pedestrian crossings are timed for the longest crosswalk and they just increase this limit of these 3.1 seconds or feet per second so for an aging population so there's a lot of time that the interesting part about Barry and Maine um that that signal timing is is designed on the longest crosswalk it's out there but if we were to run a crosswalk from lobbyist over to cool jewels a lot of people do it but we would have to time that signal for that 3.1 second feet per second which would be a very long pedestrian time so that's a nice thing about roundabouts is there are there's no wasted time there's no clearance time there's no all red time and pedestrians cross one lane at a time and then have those safe refuges in between the lanes so um so that's a distinct advantage of a roundabout over over a signal there's no wasted time I hope you ask about also the adaptive signal technology that's I think that's exciting new technology it it's important I think the numbers wrong though on that I believe the estimate we got is 300 that included memorials okay so you did that all right so um so adaptive traffic signal technology is just as it states uh it adapts it's smart technology it adapts to actual demands with video true video technology and there are algorithms to help the to communicate between traffic signals um so one traffic signal speaking to another one it's a figure of speech um and so what that does is it takes it will take a traffic signal at phasing um out of sequence to respond to traffic demands so if you're all familiar with the main and very intersection you know that the pedestrian phase always comes up after east state street there's no car on east state street and it'll go right to the pedestrian phase adaptive signals will adjust based on actual demands it will know that a vehicle's been waiting on east state street but I'm not going to serve that now because I know I've got platoon flow coming from this intersection that's in sequence it's coordinated I've got to serve that first I'm going to fit in this east state street a couple of cars over here I've got a pedestrian waiting over here I'm going to fit that in and then I'm going to let these other cars come in and it just constantly adapts and sinks that's to me is far more efficient it's going to take some getting used to because if you're waiting we'll start stepping out on the crosswalk and you know east state street just went oh boy so you actually have to take care to you know actually look at the cues that you're providing so some of the results that we've seen from this similar community it looks like we could probably expect somewhere between 20 and 40 less hey correct could you can you speak into the mic yeah 20 to 40 less stop delay throughout the corridor and also 20 to 40 less stops that's what makes it really exciting if you don't have those cars stopped idling unnecessarily an intersection people are moving less wasted time for those clearances yeah so my particular question on the adaptive signaling which does sound really cool is is there any data on how robust it is it feels like it depends on a fair amount of software always working and all of the connections working and so on where for example compared to roundabouts all it needs is the shape you know you don't need any tech so you don't need to call tom on the weekends when it doesn't work for example so i mean challenge accepted tom i guess a real thing i mean i imagine that these signals the adaptive signals are relatively new there might not be a ton of data on that but do you have any sense of what we could expect with that or so there's there's always a failsafe with these systems so go back to either localize control over that intersection if there's a network issue or it would go to the old traffic signal systems which were terribly inefficient which is a fixed time so everybody gets 30 seconds on this street or 10 seconds on this so there are failsafe systems state of vermont is using that now they just installed one in waterbury and where else did they tell us they have one it's been in place for a few years now so not much in vermont but it's being used likely so okay i would love to uh opens up to the public if public what has any comments questions john snell i'm mainly a pedestrian have mainly been a pedestrian but of late with a bad knee i'm driving more so i play both ways um the one of the questions i have is can anything be done to reduce traffic on berry street coming into town that would make a difference i mean to reduce the volume the volume of traffic yeah so well that wasn't i guess in our charge to look so and in general and in general are you are you forecasting increased traffic volumes or is it the same or will there be a reduction we looked at the forecast generally is for increased based on growth and development so we did use that i'd love to to see whether there's any option for taking cars off berry street and putting them on memorial drive uh brolin street what's that close to where you could do that yeah plant trees well actually you know one i'm not a traffic engineer but just anecdotally what i hear from people is i think and you know this is this cuts both ways because the the granite street bridge is one of the most historic bridges in the state but it is a very narrow bridge and i think people are dissuaded from using it a more functional bridge there might then create another traffic alternative for people rather than going all the way into town but i don't you know i don't know how that models out in the flows and all that kind of stuff but i know a lot of people don't like using that bridge can i can i jump on to your question there sorry i don't want to interrupt you here you know um i forgot to ask um was one of the things you considered making berry street one way or was that not in the it was never seriously considered at all it was a suggestion okay but given there's i think someone said stone cutters way but the amount of inconvenience is really beyond what i would ever recommend because you know one way streets can work when there's a block so you just have to go around the block sure it's a long so it's a long way there's not a lot of cut through is how people go all the way up helm street and everyone would have to turn left on the stone cutters to go out that yeah yeah from me yep okay thank you i just want to make sure i asked that yeah it was definitely a suggestion okay great um uh ashley i would just i would assume in conjunction with this would be some traffic calming measures particularly in like the berry street area some raised tables or something along those lines just i i think with the addition of some new commercial properties that are coming in that are supposed to attract more people you know that's that's sort of a straight shot if you're coming from downtown montpellier and headed out to the co-op or to caledonia spirits you know as someone who's lived there and i'm sure the mayor has seen this too people fly when there is an opportunity to do so down berry street and there are lots of families children you know scoff labs like myself not crossing on a crosswalk you know but it just in terms of you know making sure that we're doing this like holistically traffic calming i think is is a pretty clutch piece in that area too uh jack i can one i have a friend who lives on berry street and he just talks about how scary it is to try to cross at some of the crosswalks because of traffic i can also report that from at the montpellier transportation infrastructure committee last week we spent some time talking about the process of developing our traffic calming policy and so that that is moving forward uh criteria and process and everything so it's definitely something that's in the works okay thank you tom does you have something more yeah just quickly on the traffic volume question um and uh lucy mentioned that you forecast um an increase um those forecasts um you could speak to the to the actual trending that we've seen over the last 10 15 years of actual flat line or decrease in traffic um so we continue to design for a 1% or half percent increase in the design year but reality is we've seen the numbers drop significantly um particularly main street berry street you don't have the latest from the regional planning but can you speak to that lucy is that what you know there was a we looked at the trends of traffic was also interesting to look at a study that was done i'm going to guess in 2005 maybe that had forecasts of traffic for now and we're way lower than what they were forecasting and there's a lot of reasons for that we're seeing that all around for bond but um it's partly an aging population people are moving through their years where they drive the most into years of their life where they don't drive as much um there's just the economy changing there's all there's probably a lot of different factors to that but traffic is flat even though there is growth so it's not because we're not growing at all and then and i know the the roundabout on memorial drive that study was done even earlier and that forecasted a huge amount of growth and it did actually require a larger roundabout for that but we feel like we can get away with a smaller roundabout than that study was suggesting because we're just not seeing so we did look at there's still a recommendations of maybe one percent per year kind of growth is what you look at so that's the kind of growth we it's kind of a safety factor more than real observe brand just on on that to that's really interesting to hear also because early in the draft that got sent around to us before the meeting there's a little graph of pedestrian volumes on main street and that also goes down so it's it's i don't know what to say about that but it sounds like we are getting less pedestrian traffic less car traffic and somehow more people everyone's only have counts at one point and maybe there was a store that was more popular okay so buy and then people are going okay so we're traveling have a lot of counts all over so we have a bunch more robust set of data so hopefully we'll bring them back with them that's really so i'm i'm eve jacob's eve jacob's carny and i'm i live on saven street and really glad to see this proposal i worked on the montpelier in motion plan which is bicycle pedestrian master plan so it's great to get to this stage so i would really like to urge you to move toward a long-term solution in the short term like sooner rather than later because if we make these kind of bold revisions whichever version you take this is the kind of thing that's going to attract people to montpelier by making it really a livable city much you know we have little sections of shared use paths bike paths around and they don't connect and we have we're gonna we have a friendly ish downtown but there's all these terrible places to cross the streets and there's all sorts of broken sidewalks and problems with that but if we do these kind of bold revisions and really improve the streetscape that'll make visitors stop and stay and it will make people want to live here who don't want to depend on cars the generations of people who don't buy cars all the time so i think that is really really important to move quickly out of the short term and head to the long-term solutions as soon as possible as possible on a couple of particular things there's been conversation about having barry street community give input into the actual proposal i think the whole city needs to give input into it because it is a proposal that will affect the life of all of us it will affect how everyone moves through town in a car on a bike by walking and especially when we have the new shared use path that's going to come and end up at next to Shaw's all those people who want to get onto that or come off of it are going to need to cross main street or go along main street and i think we've got to have input from everyone about the actual proposal because it's the next stage of having input in the planning so i think you should think more broadly about having some kind of forum that everybody gets to give input into and there's a couple of particular things that i'm curious about i looked just in the last day at what was available through the agenda and so i haven't digested all of it but i think it'd be helpful to highlight in all the main street versions the m1 m2 m3 what it's like to cross main street on a bike or as a pedestrian because i couldn't easily compare all those and it looked as if some were easier than others based on whether where the bike where there was a crosswalk and what happened and it wasn't always listed as an advantage or disadvantage and then another question i had is whether the um evaluation took into account any possible impacts from the parking garage that is perhaps going to change some traffic patterns and put people draw people in or out in a different way than happens now and i didn't know that i couldn't see but i didn't look at all 47 ages great well thank you that's a great suggestion about the broader community weighing in on them is is there can you tell us whether you took into account what the new parking garage might have as an impact well we really just focused on what the changes would be from the bike lanes and it's knowing that there is a potential you know additional parking resource i was thinking the traffic pattern because you were talking about things like volume of traffic the traffic movement would bring people like especially if you have if it means people coming on elm street um i guess you sort of ruled out some of the elm street changes but if people are having to come from east state street or from main street or from elm street and go through one of these intersections to get to or from the parking garage then that may have an impact on which of these versions whether it's a roundabout or something that allows you to turn right or go straight or not turn right or go straight that just might be more critical than it might have appeared if you didn't have a funnel of extra cars going through there but don't know if that's gonna send more cars there or not i just wanted to be sure it was thought about thank you yeah good question yeah good oh or mary miss here um i missed uh how long it is between this process where you present the ideas and where this actually might come to some decisions i missed is there a timeline for that i i couldn't quite read the um the printing their project timeline so uh they're expecting to have the final form of the report done and presented to the council by the end of may so may 31st and then the council like we were sort of mentioning that we'll probably have our own process to decide um how we prioritize uh the projects or if we want to actually do any of them and then it's likely that that might be built into the um any you know first steps to um you know pay for any changes that are um you know that are the highest priority um would be built into the the next year's budget which would start in uh yeah 2020 okay the like july of 2020 at the soonest yeah i was just thinking about you know um and i'm new to this but the time period where where people give a lot of suggestions and then people work on the ideas and the planning and then from there where people can look at those ideas and planning and say do we want this or not and and i think that piece ought to be a good piece of time with the community too to review all these things because this is a lot of information in here it's a lot of changes and i i will hope that's um enough time for people to uh to really consider what's being proposed you know i mean that's what a lot of things are up against a lot of decisions and stuff in the long run i wish there was no traffic in town no cars i wish we had like eight satellite parking areas from the different directions coming into town and i wish none of the state street main street you know none of the section had cars and i think we could accommodate that with other vehicles that aren't cars and um accommodate people with disabilities and uh with vehicles that may be electric powered that can carry five or six people from satellite areas into downtown where they can walk bicycle ride a scooter ride a trike you know ride a horse ride a mule whatever works because uh in the future too that 30 years out or 20 um we probably won't have these kind of vehicles that much you know um i don't know how long it'll take but there'll be a lot of big changes coming in so i hope that that's my thing for the future i hope that downtown's don't have to do all these roundabouts and all this stuff be for cars anyways all right thank you thank you i'll drive the first uber mule i think that we are realizing the limits of our planning when we have too many variables in the mix we don't know whether we will or will not have a garage we don't know whether we will or will not have a train uh reducing load off of barry street via the a bud car coming in from pioneer street is the logical and immediately available solution um so i understand it's a very complex calculus with maybe too many moving parts but one thing that came to mind is we need to design sooner than later decide you all need to decide sooner than later is whether in the process of all this construction we are going to potentially adopt the ideas that that i mentioned earlier of the the architect who went blind and made his city so accessible to blind people through textures and grooves on the sidewalks i think it's it's a brilliant application to montpelier we got such a friendly perfect city to become you know the accessible capital for the site and pair you know and provided we could do it safely but it takes a comprehensive systematic citywide design at the same time so that we don't miss an opportunity of each section of walk going in levels stable with the proper grooves and the proper textures to aid that kind of navigation uh i'll reference you back to the 60 minutes episode that detailed all this um there's privacy implications to the video of adaptive uh traffic signaling who gets that data and and for what purposes distinguishing a plan from a concept we basically got a concept now and taking that all the way to the planning level is something i'm running into with you know a state house wiring plan it's a concept it's not a plan and do you start building and what are the repercussions or potential pitfalls of starting to build when you don't have a plan the historic bridge the grand street bridge i noticed in richmond they took a very historic bridge and they strengthened it and expanded its width they added one more section uh so it might be a model worth considering for grand street it's enough for now thank you constantino stavros i just like to say that in terms of getting hung up on things like parking we should be thinking about what we want our city to look like in the future and what kind of transportation we will be having so for example there is a microtransit pilot that will possibly be happening sometime in the future i think in the next year or two which would probably reduce the amount of traffic on there we currently have i think about 1100 people that live within one pillar that commute to work also in one pillar so those would be probably a good cohort of people that would be served by good public transportation therefore reducing the needs for parking downtown so we could have more space in our downtowns for human activity and less for you know inert hunks of metal just sitting on our streets so i think just thinking into the future what will our city look like should be something we need to consider um and so roundabouts more bike lanes different types transportation less of the single occupancy vehicle should be something we should be pushing towards and sorry where are you from oh i live here on my pillar okay great thanks yep yeah i'm also on intake i was on the steering committee for this as well thank you awesome yeah super all right any further comments well this is very exciting it feels like we are at the beginning of um um further conversation and uh looking forward to having those conversations so uh to be continued thank you all for your work on this i know you've spent so much time yeah very grateful uh all right how are we doing team do you need a break yes please okay let's take five minutes all right uh we are going to um come back from our break and so the the next topic that we have here is uh the revisiting our tax stabilization policy so we have a draft that we have for consideration i'm going to turn it over to you bill to introduce this or talk through it or yeah cool over the last year one of our list on our strategic plan was to revisit our tax stabilization policy as you know it's the last couple of meetings or hitting some of these finish up items and uh and certainly we've had a couple of applications which had some good conversation which helped inform what um people thought were important or concerns about the policy tried to give you the history of its its approval and support and the statute that's behind it examples of some of the awards and then i drafted a policy with help from laura from mdc and also the comments that um you all made at council meetings i certainly don't expect that you're going to adopt it as is considering some of them say should we define this better and those kind of things but wanted to get a sense of what you know what you liked about it what you don't like about it what uh what you know really when you're if we're going to continue a tax incentive it really should be to reward what we want to reward and i think you know looking back in the history of that um and particularly when you see it's a sort of pre 2003 i mean the city's sole goal at that point was just to expand the grand list and add jobs period and so that's what it was used for after 03 of course the state law changed uh which took away the ability for to stabilize school taxes and even though it went up to a 50 for 10 years as opposed to 33 percent for seven years it was still a lot less money for people so it's really been used a lot more sparingly in that time until you know ironically just we had two or three the last couple years but that's been the exception rather than the rule but nonetheless i think um it's been kind of on our radar to try to update this anyway it's been since 2003 and so basically get a sense of what's what's important amongst you know i'm not going to read through everything that we changed i think what i tried to do um to at least lay out was first of all make clear that this also involves commercial housing the the language said industrial or commercial properties and under the definition of commercial properties includes commercial housing but i don't think it was clear that people could do this so people building new commercial housing or renovating commercial housing would be eligible for that so we want to make sure that you know just given our emphasis on housing um obviously we talked about jobs and i added in the environmentally responsible department so just tried to make those things clear as we went down through um try to simplify the awards we used to have this huge smorgas board of awards and you know really all everybody ever wants is yeah i mean it's just people always want the best one at every level so let's just call it what it is um and then tried to add in and these numbers were just ones i picked but just to add in specific uh instant you know that the creation or renovation of commercial housing is a struck me after the last meeting that we were talking a lot about the condition of housing and should we have housing inspections and all that it's like well why not create an incentive for people who you know redo an apartment building and make it safer and better and those kinds of things and so make it easier for people to do that tried to define a couple things you know there are some clearly some areas that need further development um and that was it i one of the issues that had come up was you know what what are uh good jobs like what's the job standard we you know had talked about the states excuse me livable wage and so one idea and i talked to a couple of you after the last meeting was all right well you know if we don't like what the state says is a livable wage we ought to at least hold ourselves accountable we do have the livable wage policies but that whatever our sort of lowest full-time wage um we obviously must consider that sufficient to work in Montpelier uh and so that um that that would be the standard by which somebody had to meet or exceed and that um and that if there were no benefits then we would add basically the benefit cost to that so that it was equivalent and um and that and then that would be changed each year we would just publish this is what the city wage is for January 1 for this coming calendar year and that would be what people have to meet and that's something we can control if we if we want to you know increase that wage that's something we would do for our own employees and then would set the standard for other people and then i just listed things under the top level but again those could go wherever you want them to that had been mentioned in this room as is areas people wanted to see so energy efficiency historic preservation i thought it might make sense to create an even better you know you can reach one level with one level of jobs and a separate level if you have either either more jobs or jobs that pay above a premium above the city wage so to speak and then of course additional housing units and the rest was mostly i think cleanup as far as language of you know those were the general thoughts i had and hopefully we're reflecting thoughts that you had and from that where do you want to go connor and then ashley maybe maybe a couple of the legal beagles can help on this one but um i voted against a couple of these and like sure enough they they actually met the definition on you know all accounts there does the city have any legal liability if we were to refuse one of these but they met that standard it's explicit that it's a discretionary okay so if that's a case like financial benefit to the city that would be just completely subjective you know if you looked at it or what about like okay so the project would not be in montpellier without any stabilization remember like timber homes that came up and so we took that you just asked them right and they said now we come here anyway so deem said mansion your mind but um like how do you approve that so i i actually took that section out oh you did okay yeah because um we've struggled with that every time and i think part of that has been our own um our own other requirements so we we required people to have their permits in hand prior to seeking tax stabilization and that's a you know for a big commercial project that means there's some engineering design there's you know architectural design you've got to go through your permitting process bring your experts you've already got a fair amount of cost and you've probably acquired the land or have leased on the land you've made a commitment so so to go through all that effort and then say well we wouldn't come here especially for just for the municipal tax you know it was a stretch so i think we either if we're going to require that level of preparation i don't think it's you know it's just not a fair question on the other hand i suppose you could reverse it and say prior to seeking your permits you come in and say here's my concept here's my budget so far and i can't really go forward with this that might be another way to do that and then we could make that determination at that level before they go down the road and uh and my thinking was and again doesn't mean it's the right thinking was if we're going to sort of have them already go through their permits to come in then what what are the incentives what are we getting and so really hit the the renovation of apartments and and reward the behaviors that we want to see as opposed to just you know you're coming in but we also want to see grand list you know what you know when you go back to the economic development strategic plan for instance one of the things that it called out was that there had only been an increase of 10 private sector jobs in my failure over i think the last decade and that was you know called out we've had public sector jobs you know just this last one that we approved is 50 private sector jobs coming into one one project so in terms of at least that goal that was one that was being met now if that's not as much of a goal for us then here's our chance to put our money where our mouth is i have actually i have a long list of thoughts um so one thing um i appreciate that mdc was involved in this um but i'm hoping for a more robust group of people at the table to come up with a plan like this because tax abatements mean that residents are supporting the infrastructure bill for example when projects are coming in that are going to have people driving through Montpelier you know there's going to need to be improvements made to other areas other things in our community that these businesses need to be here um and that means residents are in essence paying that so i'm i am um i would love to see more people at that conversation table than just of you know the sort of economic side of things and you know i think i think there need to be like residents there there just need to be a lot more perspectives um at the table when we sort of talk about how this policy can be um redesigned so another piece that um i don't see in here and i don't know what the appetite is um but i know for example with caledonia spirits there was an infrastructure piece that the city invested in and there was uh tax abatement as well and to me the infrastructure upgrades are pretty significant in terms of you know the the benefit that every person can derive from that right because if you're building out sewer and you're building out access to city water and things like that that that sort of opens up other development possibilities um but i really struggle with the notion of doing both infrastructure upgrades and tax abatement i i would love to see some some election you know like the city you know can approve up to x amount of infrastructure you know if there's a problematic intersection or we need to build a sidewalk or whatever um then you know the city is willing to sort of put in that but is not going to to abate any sort of taxes or or some hybrid formula wherein the maximum sort of city investment and i consider an abatement and investment because it's revenue that that we're losing um uh i i would like to see some sort of um further development of of what those options are because if we're going to spend ten thousand dollars on infrastructure upgrade and we're abating taxes for you know what i don't recall off the top of my head but um that's a pretty significant uh investment for the city which translates directly to all of us are paying for that and it's something that will certainly bring other people in but that's going to be wear and tear on the roads and increase traffic in certain neighborhoods and um so i love that we clarified that commercial housing is included in part of this what i don't see in here though are any protections for renters in that so it's great that commercial housing um exists i think it's a it's one way that um folks like myself in you know not here in maplia because i have been incredibly lucky that i have a great place to live now um but you know okay that's great so we we want to encourage and incentivize people to maintain their properties well but how do we make that affordable still so you know you go in and you make i think one of the one of the tiers was three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in either renovations or new construction um but then if you're going to turn around and charge you know twenty five hundred dollars a month in rent you're certainly creating units and making them accessible to some people but i don't know that that really furthers our goal of actually making maplia reflect our shared values um can i just interrupt and then just to be clear it's three hundred and fifty thousand dollars of an investment or renovation or creation of four more commercial units it doesn't mean you have to spend three hundred fifty thousand on those units right well so but either way you know so if we're abating taxes and the rent there is like so completely out of reach for the sort of median renter demographic that's not something that i have any interest in in putting taxpayer money towards so can i play devil's advocate on that because if somebody renovates we want people to renovate their properties or build new housing and the cost of that's going to get passed along to tenants under any circumstances that is true so the disincentive would be to just leave them the way they are and keep the rents down in this case at the very least if they have reduced taxes that savings could be passed along to the tenants if they from the improvements of their properties well that assumes a degree of altruism well i'm just saying that that i mean we could just we could not include housing as an incentive um but i don't know i mean maybe there's another way maybe there's rental subsidies or something else we could i don't know how i think it would be that rent wouldn't you know rent would not exceed what you know whatever the the median rent plus x percent or something you know i i i just i feel like if we are going to incentivize that kind of development we should be incentivizing that but we can't be incentivizing that at the at the price of pricing out the people who are already living here because you know if you renovate and you invest $350,000 or or are you ready to whatever you meet your threshold dollar amount wise and then you know i get i get my i get my you know offer to renew my lease for the next year and my rent's going to go up $700 a month because well now the apartment will command that i can't stay so i want to be mindful that incentivizing on the one end often translates to significant disruption on the other so i think we so i guess i just push back again and say i think you need to so it's the difference between the current value and the new value and the municipal tax on that so you know is the savings on the taxes enough that's going to create the difference between how much i think it might incentivize someone but does it you know if they improve at $700,000 you know they're gonna save whatever they save it's the investment in the property that's going to drive the rent not not the taxes i mean i think but but they're getting other taxpayer money and then they're pricing out renters who have who have been established there so that goes to the question of is there a public interest in having people improve their properties then if it's going to drive rents up well i i think the answer is yes but we as a city have the ability to incentivize the kind of development that we are looking for which is the kind of development that makes our units habitable but that also does not further marginalize communities that have been historically marginalized in montpelier anyway so other things on your list yeah a bunch of them okay and i'm not sure what the best way to i also went sort of section by section with suggestions so i don't know i gave um yes jack and then i have a direct response a couple of direct responses to what she was just saying this might be a good time for that um with the housing i was very pleased to see the housing in there i think what we things we can do to encourage housing development are good it's already a tiered structure and i can imagine adjusting it so that you get one level of abatement for housing because because i think we've seen some new housing new rental housing that has been that rents out a pretty high rents and yet i think we would agree are beneficial to the city to have the new housing and i think that we could set it up so in order to qualify for the higher tier of benefits you need to satisfy some kind of rent affordability test similarly if the if the housing that we're looking at is improvements or renovations rather than new development i could see us having a condition of rent stabilization or nondisplacement for for a number of years the way that the weatherization program for instance says that you can't get the all this weatherization money and then kick the people out who are there so i think there are ways to address some of these concerns although i'm just while we're interrupted but pause here any other thoughts on housing okay back to ashley um so let's see i'm also i am really struggling with the notion that you apply once for something and can get a maximum possible 10 years that just seems like an incredibly long time with you know zero oversight um so i i think that's just sort of a more general point so now uh let's see so and i thought was uh fine um there were so in uh number two uh in the conditions let's see um so i'm also wondering i think it was two g let's see uh any awards will be made for the entire application it's that last sentence um uh i'm not fond of always and never i think those are always the wrong answer so we see what we were trying to get at which is basically assurances that that um if there is an approval for one the approval will be for the other but i i also struggle to i mean i can foresee a set of circumstances where people have an application for one that meets the guidelines but the other one doesn't meet it and i i i'm not going to be in a position where i support one aspect but the other isn't met but it says any awards will be made for the entire application um so we might we might be able to just word that differently my my goal wasn't really that my goal there was that you don't get to um get your building approved and then come in the next year and say oh by the way we now want our personal property we forgot to ask for that okay that's way more so that you're basically you've got to ask for it all when you come in and that um so that it would be and that you can't ask for business personal property unless you're also asking for a new building so you can't so so that makes way more although you know i suppose if somebody renovated a building and then came in and said well then they could ask for the they could ask for the renovations but they're bringing on all new personal property i was really thinking more if you just have a business they do out all put in a whole new personal property come in and say now we want tax stabilization on it we wanted to see a bigger investment than that so i was just trying to basically say you've got to put it all in one package so so i something i that's that makes way more sense to me than than how i interpreted that um right and in essence that sort of precludes people from getting the second bite at the proverbial apple um so uh with regard to um finding this findings of fact is page two number seven um before approving a tax stabilization contract the city council shall make specific findings of fact on which to base the general findings that the project meets um i think we need much more clear guidelines about like what exactly it is because you know i think every time this has come up there have been questions about what kind of jobs how much are they paying you know what are uh what you know how are we defining this and that seems to be a bit too subjective for me if if we as a city are going to um continue to have any sort of tax incentive like this i think that um we have an obligation to be very clear in what our expectations are and part of that to me is also being transparent with residents about what it is that we are all paying taxes for and so you know to to be sort of told that you know a request about what the wages look like or what you know what tier the jobs are in is intrusive um i mean frankly i think we have a right to know what kinds of economic development we are supporting because i'm not super interested in supporting you know jobs that that don't pay enough for someone to work full time and support a family um so uh i i would say that those findings of fact we need to do some work on that section and really articulate maybe we need a definition section to to sort of clearly you know articulate terms of art that we use um and i think that was even mentioned later on um in this document i think we could um maybe not necessarily in the findings of fact section but under the certain criteria like the jobs was i think is probably the most difficult one the rest of them with the grand list we can pretty easily ascertain and the number of housing units those are pretty simple um we could simply say must you know we could put in a criteria for documentation that we require i agree with you that if people are not using that as a means for asking for tax break they ought to be forthcoming even if it's you know presented as a confidential document that isn't a public release but that at least the council could be you know so i i think that might be the way to do it as we could say so many jobs at this rate as documented by right and and i think that's the other piece too for me and i'm not sure if that's sort of like the the spillage over of being a lawyer where i'm like prove it i mean you know because because words are great but i want i want to see like what exactly it is that we are supporting and you know if we're supporting you know my laundry list of things that i'm not super interested in supporting um okay so the next thing that i really struggled with i have no idea what other people's thoughts are about this but the the award amounts to me i don't know what this looks like this is not my i mean policy wise i have ideas about this but in terms in terms of like economic whatever um i i don't love that it's basically up to 50 of the value of that piece of property because you know when we were doing our budget numbers you know we were debating you know the addition of a 40 000 this or a 60 000 this or a 90 000 this and to me this sort of benefit is to a business is a benefit not realized to community investment like this is a sense of community investment but this isn't going to put in a sidewalk because we're not getting that entire tax payment um and so one thing that i had sort of thought about um and i don't know how to freeze it so i couldn't really come up with anything super helpful on google either um but looking at what our total grand list is and then pegging the maximum possible tax abatement award for all projects at a percentage as so you know i'm just going to use simple numbers because math is not my best thing so let's say we had a million dollars i know our grand list is much bigger than that but if we had a million dollars and we said uh that we would alec you know we would not abate any more taxes than you know one percent i'm still not even confident i can do the math on that but um what 100 000 is that right am i right yes no maybe i don't know is that right one percent no so be a ten thousand dollars ten thousand dollars all right look at that well that's a good thing i can laugh at myself um you know and so so however it is that we decide to do it but if we sort of peg it to a percentage for a year then we as a council are also going to have to be a little bit more mindful about how we are going to allocate these projects um we you know we we that was the answer that we gave like was it the was it the community fund when when they came in last last year like there there were bigger asks and we just said you know we don't really have the money to to do that because this is what we allocated and i know that that's a different it's not really apples to apples but i think the concept is you know we agree that as a as a community this percentage of our grand list is what you know and there's obviously going to be an increase because there will be new taxes paid just not all of them um you know that that might be one way to sort of tackle this from a different you know instead of you know every person that applies for it can apply for up to the maximum you know 10 years at 50 percent um just just some sort of like benchmark for this is what we are willing to forgive this fiscal you know this fiscal year and this is what the impact looks like going forward for that so that we can sort of keep that rolling tally close to if we decide just that a limit i'm going to pause here um i appreciate that we're going sort of linearly through this but i just want to check in with the rest of the council any comments on any of the sections we've that now been talked about so far yeah donna jiv she's covered her lot at one point i thought you were at section eight benefit levels and you talked about years i did have a concern about years and wondered where the three five ten came from that would be helpful so the um 10 years is the maximum allowed by law and has been approved by our voters so 50 percent in 10 years has been locally approved uh the prior level had been one-third for seven years that had been the previous limit so that seemed like another landmark to use so basically these were taken from the last policy which just had all those different levels and I just took the top level so we had set one-third for three years as the lowest one then one-third for seven years then a half for seven years and then a half for 10 years so there was just a gradually increasing amount if the more they provide so that's that's where i mean there's no magic to these other than that's based on what we did in 2003 and maybe laura you could chime in i mean i'd like you know businesses per se you look at anything new a new project new business at least five years to level off so i wondered if infrastructure wise at 10 years was a magic number or something because i'm uncomfortable with that long and i just wanted to understand why sure holding period for a development um immobular we tend to have longer holding periods uh for would you define that please so that's the time that building is built um and that developer holds on to the building and leases it out we're kind of a unique that we have a lot of developers that continue to own their buildings so their hold period is much longer um so 10 years they're they're calculating is it 10 years 15 years plus that i'm looking to make that money back or kind of get even like get to stabilization basically um so mobiliers a little bit unique that that longer time frame that also allows developers to invest a little bit more and um be a little more uh i don't know what the right term is yeah i'm not sure how to explain that but actually the 10 years is realistic for a hold period if not longer in our market so that would be beneficial so part of that question was within our own strategic plan and we were compared to waterberry and northfield does that 10 year five year i mean what what's the regional sort of time period that i'm not sure um and it really depends on who the players are and who like who's operating and developing in those different communities so when we're looking at the level of how we compete with berry or water berry um it's i don't know on that that level of granularity i think it's also important to add in here when we're talking about that um one of the reasons why this has been in place for so long and i think been supported is that our property taxes here are significantly higher than some of our neighbors particularly berlin um you know berry's municipal taxes are rates are higher than ours but i don't know but their property values um and so part of this was as we compete for places we could still end up with the same infrastructure demand if people are you know located right over the town line and still driving on our roads to get to and from it without us getting any of the tax benefits how do we create an incentive for somebody to locate in my pillier and make that investment here and at least help equalize i know with with caldonia spirits it was very it was a huge issue for them because they were looking all over and they just said you know your difference in taxes is really a financial killer for us and so how could we make that so that they they could come in and so you know just to give you an order of magnitude talking about what what ashley was talking about you a million dollar increase to the grand list would be about a twenty five thousand dollar annual tax rate so there would be a twelve thousand five hundred dollar tax cut but it would also be twelve thousand five hundred new money to the tax bill so that's the order of magnitude and that's really the range and so anything under that is less than that so that's the amount of money per the application we're sort of talking about we're not you know i don't none of these are sort of hundred thousand dollar tax cuts they're they're much much lower than that thank you that's helpful other comments on or questions on anything up to section eight i should i should say i do but i think i'd rather just let ashley keep rolling for now my question is a little bit more general i'm not trying to steamroll no i think you're doing great i figured you could do chicken i sat easy oh um yeah go ahead now now's okay we're getting tax begging for bringing jobs to mob and so um it was prompted by seeing the um recent proposal of the one that you approved for the project that went to farm i wondered well what was the benefit of having workers there they're not downtown going to restaurants they're not buying things they don't walk around our core downtown so i wondered if you wanted to think about the definition of does it does a business just have to come anywhere in Montpelier or should it come to the core downtown because what's the real point of giving this abatement and then the other thought i had about that is that was moving jobs from Berlin to Montpelier so it wasn't bringing workers from new jersey to Montpelier the people weren't going to move they're not going to it's not going to change those people are probably going to live in the same places so i was trying to think through well what's the point of giving an abatement when the business is already just eight miles down the road and i don't totally understand why you do that because i am very concerned as Ashley and Conor both asked about are we giving away tax revenue that we could be using for the infrastructure of the city streets and the um um you know all the services that we provide so i thought i think you want to tighten up things that have to do with the jobs and think about what's the real goal involved in them so that's my piece thank you yeah um okay go ahead Ashley um and and to eve's point um that's actually that was that was the next thing on my list is um so jobs coming to Montpelier so to me when someone phrases it that way there's x number of jobs coming to Montpelier my first thought is not those are new jobs that are created as a result of a business coming to an area almost all of these have been jobs that have been transferred from other people so most the representation was that most of their employees would be coming with them um and that's great but that is not generating additional employment opportunities in Montpelier it is certainly creating positions that if people vacate that that could be an opening for another person in Montpelier and so while we get to count those as jobs added in Montpelier it's not actually an expansion like they're not creating additional positions they're just taking all of their workers who are working in this building over here and moving them to this building over here so it's we can I guess I it's nice to like read that and say oh Montpelier added x number of jobs but those aren't new jobs those are existing jobs that are restructuring to Montpelier um the other pieces and I love that the the language about the wages piece is in here and I would also in addition to the you know the number of jobs I think this was in 8a although it seems to me like maybe some of the stuff is not really in like total order because you see I'm not sure what you mean by 8a so hold on it's on type written page three like the first page three after the memo oh yeah there's it's like a repeat and so I can't tell the numbers yeah the criteria for level two oh I see uh that's yeah that's because the next one should be yeah this is really it's really section 10 oh that means the rest of my notes might be wrong um so uh I would also like as part of any requirement for this is to have a reinvestment in Montpelier plan like what are you going to do for us because you know okay you're you want to relocate here you're telling us that you're not willing well I mean one of the criteria had been like you wouldn't do this otherwise I'm that that to me seems a bit murky and um questionable and I appreciate that we got a candid answer which was like well we're gonna do it anyway but this no I know but like instead of sort of focusing on that piece like what are you as a business going to add to Montpelier because you know I've lived in other places and you know we see box stores going in and box stores serve a function it's it's a practical reality but I'm not super interested in continuing on a path where we are just doing whatever we can to attract businesses that aren't really adding anything to what we want Montpelier to be you know we can bring in CVMC jobs that are coming eight miles down the road but we're not bringing in new people living here like it's not adding to anything in our core downtown like what is that adding for people who focus their time energy and efforts in this community which is largely concentrated here so um I just in thinking about that question um in my interpretation of this uh the reinvestment in Montpelier let's say is is what the criteria are for levels one through four right so theoretically if they can meet uh some of these criteria that is how they are giving back and if we think that this list is not enough then if you have suggestions as to what they ought to be able to meet then that's fair and for example I mean like actually to Eve's point about like the location of the jobs um you know under level 3d um project must be located within the boundaries of the designated downtown or growth center so that's you know that's if we have a goal of uh growing our downtown uh you know we can we can build it in right here like this is how they're giving back um and so you know in in terms of um I would just point out that's actually for that they have to meet two of those criteria not so well so that's okay I mean maybe we reframe it as like you have to do all of them I mean but then we should probably think pretty hard about like which of those things um you know we want to require but maybe it's okay that uh you know they're meeting the point is like are are the is this the right list um for that purpose because that that's really you know why these criteria are here and maybe it's like I mean maybe what you have maybe what you're thinking about is like um you know that we will we'll build a sidewalk over the next or we'll pay for a sidewalk over the next 10 years like so timber homes had some definitive things that they were going to do they were going to clear a portion of the land and put a picnic table out and then Caledonia spirits you know they're creating waterfront access I mean those to me are definite public yeah good so how do we I mean maybe that's a it's sort of a project by projects you know how what that might look like I think they should tell us sure but maybe in here we could have one of the criteria be um you know just a little more a little more general it's like you you know you propose something you know what I mean I mean well and I think that's sometimes how you end up with things that as a city government we wouldn't necessarily think about because that's not the world that we necessarily operate in um Lauren yeah just kind of on this point um I mean I was thinking a lot about you know to me kind of to Ashley's point of you know if we're looking at the the city budget where would we put this in our priorities like would this be something that we would just automatically want to always have a certain amount we would dedicate to and to me it seems most interesting if we're able to use this as an incentive that's getting developers to think about kind of helping us meet our goals so you know we've talked to them about housing is obviously being a big goal we have a net zero goal um we have other goals that we could think about so can we be writing this in a way that you know somebody can come make the case to us um and even this incentive itself would get them thinking about here's how I can shape my project in a way that is furthering the goals that we want to meet as a city and then us being able to gauge okay this feels like a good use of taxpayer dollars that we're not getting um because it's actually helping us achieve our goals and that we're putting a some I think the more tangible we can be about what that looks like so that it's like real to the people who are trying to meet it and for us to be able to assess is this um you know some of the language of aesthetics and other things seem more squishy and subjective um whereas you know how are you helping us achieve our goals as a community that we have another so we had a couple of ideas on that actually um that didn't show up here because they came in after we after I'd already drafted and sent it out number one as far as the location we can certainly you know you could choose to move that up in the in the you know to level one or two I think the other thing you know certainly downtown and growth center is is clearly important but we also do have zones for industrial law they've got different names now but for office parks and those kind of things it doesn't mean we want to exclude you know we have a very you know one of the the Cabot warehouse out in gallison hill road you know that received it and now it's paying a lot of taxes and it's being out there and we're we've gained the benefit of that and it could have easily been across the line in Berlin so we have even you know I don't know what the jobs are but just the actual grand list total was was helpful so we if we if we want industrial development too because that brings a different types of jobs um that's important but anyway to to the point about aesthetics because I agree I think Glenn and I talked to this too about how subjective aesthetics are one idea I think this was actually Glenn's was rather than make it that aesthetic maybe simply say that they must provide a place for public art through the public arts commission so whether it's a mural on the wall or space for statue and they don't have to actually build it all they have to do say yes you can put public art on our property that is gone through our public arts commission process and that would be something they're not required to do but they could get an incentive another one that Mike suggested is as we develop what we call it what is the what the open space the green print and the the official map so we're going to be developing an official map that that says here's what we'd like to have certain easements for trails or whatever and and it basically allows the city to negotiate with a person when they want to sell their property but we can't require them to give it to us we talked a lot about that during zoning you can't make them take it but as a condition of a tax incentive we might say if you have a piece of property that's on our green print then you can get top benefits if you agree that you'll make that available to the city or sign an option with the city or those kind of things and you know that's not a that's not a regulatory that's an incentive so i mean these are the kinds of things we could build in as well cool uh don is it possible to have a subcommittee and you all come back with a more clear draft yeah i think our goal today was to see what was then go by line by line and where where people's priorities were as far as building the senate but i i did want to back up what you said because i do feel like it's it's great to have businesses downtown but i think we also have to bring in other kinds of businesses for other kinds of jobs on the outskirts so i think it has to be balanced that's all um i'm sorry yes connor i think i'm piggybacking off other people it's uh this thing could be like a hundred pages long right like we can work out with the death um and i i think it's important that the baselines and i'm comforted with the fact that i can vote no with the repercussions but like uh you know i i think i want to get out of the mindset of like okay somebody coming in and saying check check check give me some money right and it's kind of what ashley's saying too it's like what are you bringing to the community you're going to be like exceptional to get this and it could be sort of an intangible thing that we're not even thinking about here right if i open up a store and i said like all right i'm the only place in town you can buy basketball shoes for your kid as opposed to going to walmart up the hill that would be real value for me in this community right i think that's something that we don't have right now that appeals to like working class people right um so again i think we could like go into this in great detail uh i support the subcommittee idea but again y'all probably won't know on most of these that's okay my only concern about that is uh uh you know people are trying to build their business and uh you know trying to build a business on uh you know the uh intangibles is that would just be really hard um we'd have to do you could do it like really early in the process um but uh just just thinking it takes takes some chocolate or something um okay um glenn all right so just because it feels like we may be kicking this to subcommittee shortly i want to put my two cents in um with a couple of questions um first i think one of the the concerns that i have about it is that it feels like it uh is very easily skewed toward larger more well established uh businesses now and i'm curious about how we can uh look at changing that so for instance um or at least why if that skew exists which i which it appears to me and then why it might um so for instance um the first criterion for level one is basically a threshold a money threshold for application and i'd like to hear an argument for why that threshold exists what why why should we be looking for uh only projects beyond a certain dollar value on this so i think the reason for that was you know because the city does gain the other half um that if we if there wasn't a significant sort of new revenue why would we you know why would we create an incentive just for some small increment of you know as we said a million dollar property's only twelve thousand dollars break to them and twelve thousand increase to us you know hundred thousand dollar properties can be twelve hundred dollars so if we're only gaining twenty four hundred dollars twelve hundred dollars out of this why would we so i think it was strictly a financial consideration i think if you were to maybe take that out for a certain number of jobs or like you know that's why i took the money away just for housing units just say just create housing units you know regardless of how much you're spending because that's something we want and so i think we could put that in but i think the dollar amounts are strictly to make it worth the city's while to get the money coming in yeah and i i i think i understand that um and i do appreciate the the kind of lower threshold for things like like housing or the different threshold i guess even so uh feels to me like uh an incremental good is still a good uh and so if we get a whole pile of small good projects that's that's good and we might want to encourage that so i'm not saying we shouldn't do that i'm saying that's why it was like this i mean this is your policy and you we could okay we could do whatever we want with that okay but then you might be getting a lot more applications the counter has to vote no on right and and when i put this question to to my partner kate uh she said basically you you might just get buried in tiny little applications and i i'm curious whether that would really happen if we took out the threshold entirely i guess if anyone has any kind of prediction on that jack i have a couple of thoughts uh one of them is more general and one of them is more specific i whenever we do a tax stabilization contract it is a tax expenditure we are foregoing revenue i know it is uh very difficult to measure or to to enforce the the but for test um but i'm i'm just concerned if we don't have the but for test i i think it takes some we should have some real discussion about well if we're not doing the but for test why are we making the tax expenditure at all if if we think that the but for if we think this tax expenditure is not bringing the investment to the city then because that seems to me like that's what eliminating the but for test means then i think we just need to discuss that sure and then the other thing which is a more fine-grained observation when we look at the at the city wage and we have a differential depending on whether uh the job includes benefits or not i think we need to have more specificity about what it means to say the job has benefits with it great um counter than glenn than steve quick question how much does the lowest i don't know if i want to ask this how much does the lowest paid city worker make you know i have that info and i i'll get it for okay glenn all right uh next question i think might be easy to answer um and might be i don't know this only applies to commercial development um and that also seems like uh it's not entirely clear to me why that's necessary uh if i buy some land and build a house on it that's good for the city so i have a very easy answer to that i thought you might the state doesn't allow us to do it right okay i just wanted to make sure that that was it okay uh do you have that if you're still looking oh the i'm looking there but i mean the statute is right in there yeah okay i i'll get there i tried to read that and didn't quite understand it so the final question i have uh i think is still for bills i'm just gonna pile more questions on um i wanted to follow up on one of ashley's points about oversight over the the length of the term say it's 50 for 10 years i feel like i read somewhere in there that we do check to make sure that for example the job still exists and i'd like to hear just a little bit about that so they're required to do an annual report and we through the assessor will do spot checks and confirm with them and make them at the very least sign a document that they're doing that um but they and we obviously check to see we once the most most of the criteria is either the jobs or the grand list value um for the most part and at least under the current policy so we know that we know that the grand list value has maintained but if there were other conditions like putting in a boat array up or something like that we make sure that those those conditions are still being met in that because it is a contract it's not uh and we have i think there's something in there about the ability to i'm hoping to get to steter yeah working on it i'm almost there so our lowest full time rate is $15 and 40 cents with a 40 with the 45 benefit so it's a couple dollars higher than the state livable wage okay so i apologize for not Steve Whitaker not having these thoughts as well organized i'm no expert in tax stabilization but i want to just make some observations we recently witnessed the kind of race to the bottom with the amazon second headquarters uh we've heard uh the phrase uh privatize the profits socialize the costs uh we may be trying to contort ourselves into such a uh potentially advantageous to the wealthy who can afford to develop uh that we are selling all the rest of our citizens short um this may not really be worth pursuing beyond what we've already done i i just the example on the other side the example of why would you give go out of your way for $12,000 you know because your kid can get basketball shoes locally right i can't buy a men's shirt in in this town you know it's it there are disadvantages too uh but the idea that we those who can afford to gain the system and apply who can apply a staff to apply for these stabilizations that really is a not a finger on the scale it's a it's a foot on the scale and maybe we need to keep it very simple that if you want to contribute and join into this community and build it pony up and the benefits are will apply equally to everybody but this idea of giving 10 years of you know 50 off your taxes is it's not something that the poor people and the renters who are paying the taxes for the landlords are going to agree with uh so you're making decisions on behalf of people who aren't as uh well off as yourselves so i would caution that this may be a slippery slope that advantages the already advantaged at the expense of those who aren't thank you lord did you want to say something so a large part of Montpelier development corporation a quick one or applied to um Steve's comments thank you um and just kind of put it into context the development opportunities in Montpelier um we're not we don't have a lot of sites to be able to attract this you know the big fish so in in no way i do i see this tax stabilization as an incentive that's really for some you know big business that really doesn't fit in Montpelier anyway so i do want to frame that the tax stabilization is helping to incentivize something that you all want to see happen whether it is efficient buildings or good jobs or growing the grand list we're not at the scale of some of these other communities who are doling out really big incentives um and i'm very conscious of that from the economic development perspective um few things um so i want to read um something from Shannon McIntyre and Timo Bradley they weren't able to make it tonight but they're from timber homes um so they just wanted to share their perspective from the tax stabilization policy just to give you some context there um so our business timber homes in vermont recently opened our shop doors on elm street in Montpelier we've been operating out of a wall tent in middle sex for six years and slowly growing the business when the perfect piece of land for our shop came up for sale we felt ready to move forward with buying and building in Montpelier even though it felt like a colossal financial leap the number of employees and the level of production had outgrown the wall tent and we wanted to be a be a more visible part of the community we all live in we made this move carefully with our eyes wide open to the fact that to build the facility we'd need we'd be taking one significant low pay loan payments for 30 years to come and a much higher tax bill uh these factors push our business into a position of needing to meet certain of certain yearly revenue and needing a certain number of employees to do so needless to say this has been an exciting and stressful year for our company as we grow into our new size our new financial demands and our new days i understand the perspective of some some who feel it's not the city's job to give a tax break to businesses so i'd like to share what the tax break meant for timber homes for us getting approved for tax civilization has felt like a sign of welcome the city is stretching out at sand to shake ours as we venture forward saying quote i see your challenges and i want to support you specifically during your transition if we continue on the on track this year we will break even in 2019 as we spend resources finishing up our new shop for a particular case as a worker owned cooperative we intend that our business will outlast its ownership its current ownership and the city is therefore all but guaranteed a significant amount of tax revenue from timber homes long into the future the tax stabilization that we received is a generous gesture from the city and also a drop in the bucket in terms of what we will need to spend this year to be in operation i say this to point out that we are not getting a free ride by any means and in that that in that in practice the money will save we saved allowed us to reallocate funds towards trading new employees we just hired as a resident resident of Montpelier i would personally support moving to add additional requirements to being approved including living wages for employees and energy efficiency standards it's important to me as a member of this community that this program be targeted at businesses that have a positive impact uh when Montpelier's residents in our footprint tax stabilization is a valuable tool for the city to welcome new businesses and with a few tweaks could be a well-targeted incentive so that's from Shannon um the other thing i i just wanted to provide you all with um so i did a really quick development pro forma and um so sorry if this is confusing i um try to simplify it a bit and just kind of give the perspective of what have developers going through from the cost and revenue perspective of any development project um and especially in Montpelier's market the numbers are really tight um and so with this pro forma um i got creative and did a three-story mixed use building presumably in the downtown about 13,500 square feet 4,500 square feet per each level and with that there's only a certain amount that you can actually lease out so the other parts are for you know bathroom or hallway and kind of those unusable areas um so when i applied the very like very average rents um this is assuming that these are average quality spaces um apartments on the third floor 20 dollars per square foot office on the second floor 18 dollars per square foot retail in the bottom floor 22 dollars per square foot so very average for our market you can go a little lower you can go a little bit higher but that's pretty much the average um you work in operating expenses and per year the those that net operating income um some of them got a little blurry but it's $131,000 um about for the cost to operate each year or sorry the revenue is each year when you look to the other side and look at the development costs um it costs approximately 150 thousand 50 dollars per square foot to build new in Mount Pelier um and this is this is where we start to see the numbers get really close where the cost to build is pretty similar all across Vermont but when you go to some place like Burlington you're able to acquire much higher rents um and so this is where we are really tight in our market to making those numbers work um and then I got to the end and you know with a project for you to have the green light to even move forward and start applying for permits you want a net operating income that's higher than your total cost of capital um that didn't happen and I before I left the office it was like fiddling with the numbers I'd like jacked up the the rent prices I really lowered the uh interest rate on the loan and like I was going all over the place and I still couldn't get above that threshold of you know the costs were or the revenues were higher than the cost um and so I didn't do a great job of that but it's showing you like it's really hard to make a project work any sort of development project and so and to have rates that actually work within our market that people are going to pay to open up their shop or to have to you know open up a new office so when we talk about you know new businesses that want to open up and try their their concepts it's really tough to enter into a building with twenty two dollars per square foot into a first floor retail space so that's where it gets a little it gets a little challenging for developers to to build and to get the the return there's a certain rent that they have to hit and yet so all to say it's really tough to make the numbers work in this community so any little bit helps especially if we want to build in our downtown if we want to redevelop brownfield sites like that just continues to add to the cost so you have the soft costs which are architectural designs engineering drawings and add into that any infrastructure improvements that they're paying for the for themselves it really it starts to climb and so I just I just wanted to put into context people aren't getting rich off of these develop developments it's a really tight margin for any and all in this city so just to again put that into context so I'm anticipating team we have a lot more work to do on this conversation to be had and we did just talk about having some kind of a working group meeting to talk further about this so that does that sound okay to you the group I'm seeing a lot of nods just general council members so it's a subcommittee some of that council subcommittee I had assumed a council subcommittee but I think we should you know to Ashley's point about you know having a broad set of stakeholders I think we could I mean it's obviously going to be a public meeting but sort of be intentional about making certain you know voices are at the table um but I think it's my suggestion we have a small council group and you know some staff people to flesh out the ideas and then hold a pub you know public hearing and reach out to different groups because you know okay yeah sure so and and it has been you know voted on three times um uh so thinking like maybe a group of three counselors max well I was going to also jump in there I'm sort of interested in this but unless unless you actually are you interested yeah okay glad okay if that's okay jack okay let me know if you have thoughts to add uh okay great so we'll find some time oh oh Lauren yeah I was going to say I mean this is something that I think I'd be interested to bring to the social and economic justice group and get their thoughts and I think a lot of this conversation fits into how are we you know positioning this within all of our priorities and how is this dealing with equity and other other issues so I will I will do that as that's kind of happening on a parallel track great thank you and any suggestions that people have about priorities or your ideas please send them to me and then we'll we'll work that through the committee and I'll just note one one last comment from me at least is you're talking about the impact on the community I just know one last comment from me at least you're talking about the impact on the community some of Steve's comments this has been in place since 1980 um and we've done it and in the first you know from 1980 to 2003 at 26 of these and some of them weren't large and to be clear if you're looking at an estimated amount of the contract that's the grand list amount that's not the dollars tax dollars so just in case there's any confusion about that so no one got a two million dollar uh tax cut it was only their their taxable value you know since then there's only been five so it's not like this is something that happens a lot and particularly that that it really tracks with the um the change that we couldn't do the school tax um and so I think you know it is people the pro forma that that Laura shared is very comparable to many conversations I've had with people about doing projects in town and so you know this isn't something we do a lot of although hopefully if we have more development we will uh check two quick observations one going through the looking at the particularly some of the considerations that uh the draft ads um I think there are there are city committees that are whose work is relevant to that housing task force there's there's some energy stuff in there and so asking those relevant committees to look at it I think would also be useful um I also think that as a factual I think this point will be lost if we don't if I don't mention it now which is that with the uh abatement or a tax stabilization agreement we just did for the cvh project I believe that at least some of those jobs are not jobs transferred from Berlin or barrier here they're new jobs because some of those jobs are for their epic center which is a new software package that they're rolling out and it's it's training installation and implementation of their new software program so I think those at least some of those are going to be new hires who would have been somewhere else if they didn't go to Montpelier um I just want to um revise my previous offer I think I've in the last 30 seconds realized that I I just don't I actually don't have time so if Jack if you are still willing to be on it Jack you can make sure you reach out to all those groups yeah okay so I'm out just just making sure we're clear Ashley did you have something more I just I I I'm I appreciate that this has been in place since 1980 but I can look at lots of policies that have been in place for a really long time and um I I just I don't I don't find the fact that something has existed for a very long time as as a reason to continue to perpetuate it like I I think it's a conversation that the city needs to have and I think it's also I think it's also fair that it may be the kind of thing where people are like we don't want to do this anymore I mean and I'm not saying that's on that's anything that I've proposed I've proposed scaling it back significantly but I just I want to make clear that for me simply because something has existed for a significant period of time does not make it something that that is something that needs to continue to perpetuate itself and to be clear my comment about that was not right just because we did something before doesn't mean we should do it again it was that it has existed and has not really created financial hardship on the city and in fact you can see many successful projects hunger mountain co-op and other things that are our big contributors to the community that was all I was saying final comment since you've just formed a new subcommittee can I request that we allow people to be email notified of those subcommittee meetings so that sure it's subject to the open meeting law and if at the end of the meeting or whatever I'd like to raise the issue I spoke with you about just because of the Sunday deadline that's coming up I have to refresh my memory but okay I'm sorry we're about to have 30 or oh yes yes that's right that's right that's right that's right my pillar police interpret a vague section of state law to make it illegal for those people who are about to be out on the street thank you okay um so moving on so uh do we know who's calling that meeting by the way of the subcommittee you'll do okay great all right so moving on so we're on to a discussion about the rec building uh sue new rec center with pools to focus for now on the existing rec center and try to get a handle on the costs and what it might look like to improve that building and there wasn't really a consensus I guess at that meeting about how to proceed so I'm trying to get a little more direction from the council specifically on how to proceed the proposal that I put forward and and it's up for discussion and and if you'd like to change it would be to um contract with an architect to walk through the existing building and work with the senior center uh the existing building and the consultant to come back to you with a range from uh basically just getting the building up to code getting it safe and slightly more usable the bare minimum to making it a sort of a premier rec center and what would be involved in the costs the layout this would not be a final architectural design it would be just a quick look to give you a better sense of what your options are so that the council can make a smarter decision going forward comets had done it I guess I wanted to go to the next steps sooner that I thought when we got the proposal and I'm sorry I don't remember those numbers I was really hoping not to have to shout out another ten thousand dollars to do the minimum when we did some of the minimums before and got estimates I'd really like us to be a little bolder and move forward but maybe we can't maybe we can't go to the architect and actually get a design until we do this step is that what you're telling me it just seems that we've already done the minimum I is that would would you say that's true have we done the minimum sort of evaluation at this point well we know what the cost of putting in an elevator would be the guesstimate somewhere around 350 thousand dollars but also to to do the minimum we have to redo bathrooms and redo stairs we have to go down into the basement and figure out you know as they're letting the building all of that so we're not a hundred percent sure the consulting guesstimated around one to two million but he said right up front he's not an expert which is why we would bring in an architect who is an expert to figure out what the cost of that would be versus going all out and and I'm guessing that you would like first to break down on what it would cost to do the full again the architect guesstimated it would be about five million dollars to do a total overhaul of the building the consultant did but he said it's not a specialty so that I would think you might want a slightly better nailed down estimate going forward I mean my ideal situation is that there would be some options even in between right so well we know what what the the minimum would be and what perhaps the you know the the premium you know the luxury option would be but knowing that there's probably some steps in the middle you know if we wanted to refurbish the basement you know if that was something that we could isolate as a cost or or just the bathrooms like that sort of as as you're saying but I'm not sure what the different elements would be but I'm sure that you know this process I might hope anyway would be that this process would figure that out and be able to assign some costs to that so we'd have some choices I like your point that if within the grand picture he he or she did the projects they were self-standing then we might do some mix and match sure but okay sure I sort of yeah my feeling on this was just that if we're going to go even if we go forward with the we're going to renovate the building we're going to be asked well what would it cost to just do the minimum and so we might as well have that hard number and be able to present this is this is the difference and this is what what we think we're getting for it and well will these be the hard numbers or will it be harder than what we have now until the architect so they're never hard numbers really you know until you actually design something I mean I think this is you know people always want to know what the hard numbers are and we care that you don't know the cost well the fact is you don't really know the cost until you get your bids back but what you do is you know you start with a ballpark estimate then the architect will they'll apply square footage cost so that'll be a better estimate then you move forward into design and then you have real specific you're gonna have too many inches of this and so many feet of this and then they put unit costs and then then you've got a much much better cost but then you put out the bid and it could be high low depending on the market so you know I mean you never know we run into this a lot with people sort of you know how come you don't know the cost and like you know it's like you do you do something on your house and until you get your actual cost you don't know I think we could probably use a vote on whether move forward or unless conard yes oh oh go for it yeah yeah you got it move to approve the proposal to develop cost estimates and design concepts for the renovation of the recreation center I'll second for the discussion I just wanted to raise a question so having not been here when the decision was made to kind of limit the scope so I you know got the survey in the mail and filled it out diligently and with a kid I was like oh a pool would be so great and get that that's not where we're going but I'm just thinking of public process and knowing how many conversations we're having on front porch forum and other things about public process and it seems like an opportunity to engage the public and make sure that like I didn't even know that this decision had been made so there's clearly some room for better communication about how this process is going and ensuring that we're setting up a diligent process for you know okay we get back a menu of ideas which sounds great and how are we getting input from people and engaging especially because this was initiated with a city-wide survey so people were proactively engaged which is great but like the follow-through on that so just putting that out there like I'd like love a plan a public engagement plan around this or slash communications plan uh he comment on that sue are we planning to do that was that a part of it we can then the other thing just to add to this is um yes the short answer is yes we can we can do a public we actually sort of did do a public engagement plan it's it's kind of hard to get the word out and but even once it's developed and it's it is sort of worth going back right I mean she did the survey but doesn't sound like she knew you did public here public meetings out of city hall around that like I even had like seen the report but I didn't know that that decision had been made so just like a relatively engaged person I didn't know so I'm just guessing other people didn't I think we started social media we do press releases and press I think our interpretation of the decision too was that the council expressed a preference to look at the berry street building and that we weren't going to spend a lot more money getting final costs on a big building but we knew it was in the 14 million range and so we'd at least be able to say okay here's the minimum here's berry street and we know there's some big number out here and then engage the public on sort of that range of options I don't think it was that definitely well I hear you too and I I mean we're about to once we once we have the choices in front of us you know we're gonna absolutely want a lot of input on on that so I mean those don't those choices don't even exist yet so right so yes great oh we need to vote for the discussion all in favor please say aye opposed and motion carries great so and I think that is the end of our regular business we're going to do council reports all the other reports and then we do have an executive session and we will not be coming out from that well we won't be voting well we will we will come out that's true it's a hot situation I thought it was a meeting oh dear okay gotta keep it together here okay uh council reports do you want to go to Steve oh I'm sorry yes Steve yes now now is great thank you I recently became aware from folks who are staffing several of the shelters around and I did some deep research in it and I spoke to one of the police officers there's a perception that title section 11 11 oh six of title 19 is a section of statute relating to public highways right of ways municipally designated areas for camping and what I learned is that both of the overflow shelters that Good Samaritan runs that the city relies on uh well that the population relies on uh are closing this weekend for the season and there's been over 20 people staying at Bethany and there's at least a dozen staying at heading okay and anyway they're all they're all being shut out the Good Sam shelter is full at 30 and these people are attending to camp some of them already have backup camp ideas out of the park or there you can see some on route 302 and others people know where you can see camping but the idea that we're making inadvertently making outlaws out of all these people uh just because we haven't really thought through whether or not we want to have a designated area or whether or not we want to supply a porta potty or you know I know this could be pushed back from the business community anywhere that you allow those less fortunate to uh have a minimalist existence but you know it's something that merits attention and it's urgent because I the idea that we're automatically criminalizing uh behavior that is not a criminal behavior is troubling to me and I think government including specifically this council need to take a more active role and not rely entirely on the charity community to handle this there's bridges to be built between you know casual labor jobs in the business community and some of these folks who need to step up um but just even having a lawyer interpret section 1106 and help us understand what that municipally designated means and whether that applies only to state highways or whether it applies to all municipal because I don't think it's uh illegal to be poor uh it certainly shouldn't be so I just call that to your attention and I think that the suitor you can I would ask you point to subcommittee to work on this between now and next meeting Jack oh do you have some I was just going to respond quickly to my knowledge we've never criminalized anybody we've moved people who want to camp on downtown sidewalks and places but do people stay in all sorts of places around town and in fact our police are typically nowhere they are check on them at night make sure they're okay particularly in cold weather will in fact even will give them rides to the shelters if they're available so I don't think you know that we are criminalizing behavior we do keep them you know I think trying to find a balance as you mentioned the business community someone's camping on a downtown sidewalk we would probably move them but there are many places where people stay and we're aware of and and have not cited anybody for this that said I'm not saying those are the ideal places for people to stay and we certainly could be looking for better solutions but I don't think there's an I want to rest everyone you know make everyone clear that we're not aggressively seeking to arrest people for homeless I do not mean to suggest that we were aggressively criminalizing people but in effect what I've learned from interacting with some of these folks and the managers of the shelters is that they these in effect I think this is even where the zombie movies came from these are people who through lack of privacy and lack of basic human support and dignity are becoming less subhuman and avoided and you know cast and it's not fair or right and and we owe it to ourselves and our own humanity to figure out how to reintegrate these folks I'm jack did you have anything further well the problem of homeless people is a serious problem last year this council repealed the ordinance prohibiting begging and which I think was the right thing to do this statute 19 bsa 1106 has been on the book since 1985 I can't imagine that anyone in certainly Montpelier and I can't imagine there are many places that are enforcing it but that doesn't mean that homeless people's needs don't or shouldn't be addressed I think they they need to be and every night that someone doesn't have a place to live is it's an urgent situation for that person but some and there's something else that we need to address we've got our priorities retreat coming up might be something to talk about yeah cool okay thank you again council reports who would like to go first go ahead then I'll go first partly just because one of the things I was going to report on was what Steven just told us and I got it from him so thanks for that Steven um otherwise I want to call uh folks attention to the the newly installed watercolors in council chambers our friend Philip Robertson who is the curator at the wood gallery found and and provided these for us and I'm really pleased to see them and we had a successful I think first meeting of the city hall art committee and look forward to more of those that was a lot of fun otherwise all I have is tomorrow morning 830 to 930 at baguitos I look forward to talking with anyone who shows up great not much I attended my first community advisory board meeting with the community justice center was held in Northfield and it was I think I was really positive to see other towns sort of following the lead of Montpelier and I give particular credit to chief fecos who you know you can see he's really like leading by example and he's sort of a cops cop and the other departments were sort of looking at him saying okay you know sort of this repetitive way of going about it as the way to go you know you could see him changing people's minds uh Jamie was also there um I think representing the city manager and was tremendously articulate just sharing some you know experiences she's had um and yeah I yeah I was glad to be on the board and just very proud of the work Montpelier is doing with our community justice center um otherwise I sent it to Bill and Sue but I've got a draft of that um responsible contracting ordinance and I'll shoot that to the rest of the council the next day or so that's it for me thank you anything to be honest on the scooters um really paying a close attention to what Burlington is doing uh because it may somewhat limit our options as far as inventory depending on what direction they go in um you know one thing and the mayor and I have been on a couple of conference calls with some companies there uh it's like it's really appealing is the idea of getting like maybe some electric bikes in town as well and some companies offer that uh but it's really a matter of scale like one company said you know you need 250 electric bikes and if 100 scooters freak people out you know uh hold on to your hat uh so I don't think we're ready to like commit to that but if you like Burlington's doing some stuff we can absolutely partner with them so I'm in sort of wait and see mode before taking the next step but we do those survey results and we'll try to put together a comprehensive Sue and I just met on this today a bit so we'll try to put together a good presentation for everybody soon I know you love scooters though well people keep asking me and one is I still think we need to sit down and do an evaluation of what happened and how we would view it and maybe how we would approach it but I didn't put you on the spot on purpose I really want to I really wanted to know the information um I need to talk about two things in the parks the parks commission meant and they did an experiment this last year they are working with Mamba a Montpellier area mountain bike association mountain bike thank you anyway association they have a received a $50,000 federal grant and they are are going to be able to complete the mountain bike trails in the north branch and they went through last year experience both for walkers skiers bikers and it was really amazing very very positive there were some incidences where bikers got off trail but but they're working together and by and large it was really deemed a success they did realize that some of the features they put into a bike trail doesn't quite work for walk walkers like certain bankmen of curves and tables to jump off so but they're working on bypasses so it was really great hearing people work together the walkers the bikers and the park commission and likewise this last winter they did a flat tar and that's my ohio eye sorry uh you know the wheel and the bike tar yeah uh and so it went really well but also found out that they had a problem with signing so a lot more signs but they also need more maps because summer maps do not apply to the trails that happen in the winter so just a lot of positive development and this is also leaning into the parks commission is moving forward and working with the justice center uh to do some facilitation on working on their mission and goals within the commission and then moving out to all the stakeholders sometime in the next year so very positive news laura are you good great um i just wanted to share uh the social and economic justice advisory committee is doing strategic planning that is looking ahead to the year and trying to map out um some real to-dos and um action items for the coming year so if anyone is interested uh in like looking at that and having any input on what that is going to look like this is kind of the the point of making some decisions over the next couple weeks so um happy to share if anyone's interested in the there's a big matrix and i'm happy to just send it around and anyone who has time um to to look at that would love input to see is this in line with what the council actually wants um that group to be spending their time on okay i'll send it to everyone um because it would be great to make sure that it's on track with what everyone's hoping to see um and and then i just have a confession that the solid waste management district i haven't been able to get to a meeting yet because of family conflicts but i'm very excited for the next meeting i can make it look forward to reporting back from that and ellen's there right yeah family scheduling yes family scheduling conflicts yes largely past although i am very excited to see of some of the plans um i've been walking around a lot lately because some of the roads are just a little rough um and uh the need for better lighting in certain areas where there are crosswalks um is is painfully apparent i don't often walk because i'm usually not in town at light hours but um so i'm excited to see that um and that's it uh so i just want to let you all know that i was finally able to get the trash recycling compost group together uh and uh we didn't have a quorum so we didn't take any official actions um but uh we um i discussed the possibility of uh putting out an rfp to ask someone to do a study for us as to what it would even take to have uh citywide municipal trash recycling and or compost and so um one of our members volunteered to start a draft of a and uh an rfp to get a basically a scoping study for that um so more to come on that but i just wanted to give you that update question solid waste district should be able to help you yeah yeah well so they may help pay for the scoping study okay yeah at one point they did some composting pickups so i just thought they yep yep yep and ellen's all over that yeah that was great so uh and that is it for me okay um just note that um we have our strategic planning next week monday and tuesday you should have all got something forwarded for me from julia novak uh to be clear you don't need to actually have filled out all that but uh but she did want you to have thought about those questions in advance to be prepared to discuss that you don't have to do homework uh one of you asked that question i did clarify that might have been the teacher it might have been the teacher who didn't want to do homework right it's possible uh and otherwise we are meeting tomorrow morning with the group uh the appellate group uh about the parking garage and so we'll be talking about that shortly yeah okay so uh i think we're just about ready to go uh well move on to the next item uh if we're going to go into an executive session i think this is one of these things that requires two motions i move that the council find that premature to general knowledge of the status of negotiations regarding the parking garage will place the city of substantial disadvantage by disclosing the state of negotiations and uh the city's position in those negotiations for the discussion i'll have to please say aye aye opposed uh the motion passes and then um so to go into executive session i move we go into executive sessions to discuss the negotiations regarding the parking garage under title one vsa section three thirteen a one something yeah you got it you got it uh let's see how john writes that out something something uh there needs to be a second a one is fine is there a one e is there a second you always do a second okay uh for the discussion on favor please say aye aye aye opposed okay motion carries all right and we will not be returning wait to take any official actions right right there you go that's the one okay